Projects – Community aware group testing

How can we leverage a known community structure to make group testing more efficient?

Group testing pools together diagnostic samples to reduce the number of tests needed to identify infected members in a population. The traditional work in group testing assumes “independent” infections. However, infections can be correlated according to a community structure; consider for instance families that practice social distancing, or schools that operate with student pods, there can be a strong correlation on whether members of the same community are infected or not. In this line of work, we present designs that take into account community correlations to reduce the number of tests needed and improve the accuracy of noisy testing.