Problem 2

Challenge Title: Group testing of large populations.

Brief description of the challenge:

Examining each member of a large population can be a costly and laborious undertaking. In many testing scenarios, the workload can be significantly decreased by inspecting only a representative subset of the total population, rather than examining each individual. However, in many inspection contexts, the goal is to achieve precise identification of each individual rather than simply obtaining information about a representative sample. This is the case, for example, when detecting of infectious diseases in human population.

The objective is to find a strategy which accurately identifies individuals infected in a small number of tests and few rounds of testing. The scenario to consider is a population of unrelated individuals with low infection prevalence in routine tests.

Mathematical background | Students need to have basic knowledge of some programming language, basic combinatory and statistics.

Coordinator | Sílvia Barbeiro, CMUC-Departamento de Matemática, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal