A New Algorithm for Two-Stage Group Testing

Abstract: Group testing is a well-known search problem that consists in detecting of $s$ defective members of a set of $t$ samples by carrying out tests on properly chosen subsets of samples. In classical group testing the goal is to find all defective elements by using the minimal possible number of tests in the worst case. In this work, two-stage group testing is considered. Using the hypergraph approach we design a new search algorithm, which allows improving the known results for fixed $s$ and $t\to\infty$. For the case $s=2$ this algorithm achieves information-theoretic lower bound $2\log_2t(1+o(1))$ on the number of tests in the worst case. Also, the problem of finding $m$ out of $s$ defectives is considered.