Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Efficiently Identifying Failures Using Quantitative Tests, Matrix-Pooling And The Em-Algorithm, Brett Hanscom, Susanne May, Jim Hughes

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Pooled-testing methods can greatly reduce the number of tests needed to identify failures in a collection of samples. Existing methodology has focused primarily on binary tests, but there is a clear need for improved efficiency when using expensive quantitative tests, such as tests for HIV viral load in resource-limited settings. We propose a matrix-pooling method which, based on pooled-test results, uses the EM algorithm to identify individual samples most likely to be failures. Two hundred datasets for each of a wide range of failure prevalence were simulated to test the method. When the measurement of interest was normally distributed, at …