Speaker: Chris Bilder, Professor, University of Nebraska

Title: Group testing complexity

Abstract: Laboratories use group testing (also known as pooled testing) to test high volumes of clinical specimens for pathogens, such as SARS-CoV-2, West Nile virus, and Chlamydia trachomatis. The process works by testing multiple specimens together as an amalgamation (i.e., as a “group”), rather than testing each specimen separately, in an effort to reduce the total number of tests needed. There are many different algorithmic ways to apply group testing. The job of a statistician is to determine which algorithm will be best for a diagnostic testing laboratory to implement given the information available, such as disease prevalence. Algorithms are most often compared by their expected number of tests needed for an application, where a lower value is preferred. Unfortunately, this measure alone does not account for some algorithms having a lower expected number of tests at the expense of being much more complex to implement. For this reason, I propose a new comparison measure that I refer to as the complexity. In my presentation, I present its definition and derive its expression for several common algorithms. I show that some algorithms may be too complex for everyday implementation, while other algorithms should become more widely used. The proposed measure is illustrated for a recent SARS-CoV-2 testing implementation. 

Biography: Chris Bilder is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Bilder has been the Principal Investigator for grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health involving research into categorical data analysis problems. His research has been published in a diverse set of outlets ranging from the Journal of the American Statistical Association to Chance. For his research, Bilder received the Best Paper in Biometrics Award and was twice recognized as the American Statistical Association's Outstanding Statistical Application Award recipient. He is the author of the textbook “Analysis of Categorical Data with R,” which had its second edition published this year. Bilder is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.