Non-Adaptive Group Testing with Inhibitors

Abstract: Group testing with inhibitors (GTI) introduced by Farach at al. is studied in this paper. There are three types of items, $d$ defectives, $r$ inhibitors and $n-d-r$ normal items in a population of $n$ items. The presence of any inhibitor in a test can prevent the expression of a defective. For this model, we propose a probabilistic non-adaptive pooling design with a low complexity decoding algorithm. We show that the sample complexity of the number of tests required for guaranteed recovery with vanishing error probability using the proposed algorithm scales as $T=O(d \log n)$ and $T=O(\frac{r^2}{d}\log n)$ in the regimes $r=O(d)$ and $d=o(r)$ respectively. In the former regime, the number of tests meets the lower bound order while in the latter regime, the number of tests is shown to exceed the lower bound order by a $\log \frac{r}{d}$ multiplicative factor. When only upper bounds on the number of defectives $D$ and the number of inhibitors $R$ are given instead of their exact values, the sample complexity of the number of tests using the proposed algorithm scales as $T=O(D \log n)$ and $T=O(R^2 \log n)$ in the regimes $R^2=O(D)$ and $D=o(R^2)$ respectively. In the former regime, the number of tests meets the lower bound order while in the latter regime, the number of tests exceeds the lower bound order by a $\log R$ multiplicative factor. The time complexity of the proposed decoding algorithms scale as $O(nT)$.