Efficiently decodable non-adaptive group testing

• Authors: Piotr Indyk;Hung Q. Ngo;Atri Rudra
• Venue: SODA '10 Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
• Year: 2010

We consider the following "efficiently decodable" non-adaptive group testing problem. There is an unknown string x ∈ {0, 1}n with at most d ones in it. We are allowed to test any subset S ⊆ [n] of the indices. The answer to the test tells whether xi = 0 for all i ∈ S or not. The objective is to design as few tests as possible (say, t tests) such that x can be identified as fast as possible (say, poly(t)-time). Efficiently decodable non-adaptive group testing has applications in many areas, including data stream algorithms and data forensics. A non-adaptive group testing strategy can be represented by a t x n matrix, which is the stacking of all the characteristic vectors of the tests. It is well-known that if this matrix is d-disjunct, then any test outcome corresponds uniquely to an unknown input string. Furthermore, we know how to construct d-disjunct matrices with t = O(d2 log n) efficiently. However, these matrices so far only allow for a "decoding" time of O(nt), which can be exponentially larger than poly(t) for relatively small values of d. This paper presents a randomness efficient construction of d-disjunct matrices with t = O(d2 log n) that can be decoded in time poly(d) · t log2 t + O(t2). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result that achieves an efficient decoding time and matches the best known O(d2 log n) bound on the number of tests. We also derandomize the construction, which results in a polynomial time deterministic construction of such matrices when d = O(log n / log log n). A crucial building block in our construction is the notion of (d, l)-list disjunct matrices, which represent the more general "list group testing" problem whose goal is to output less than d + l positions in x, including all the (at most d) positions that have a one in them. List disjunct matrices turn out to be interesting objects in their own right and were also considered independently by [Cheraghchi, FCT 2009]. We present connections between list disjunct matrices, expanders, dispersers and disjunct matrices. List disjunct matrices have applications in constructing (d, l)-sparsity separator structures [Ganguly, ISAAC 2008] and in constructing tolerant testers for Reed-Solomon codes in the data stream model.