Rates of adaptive group testing in the linear regime

Abstract

We consider adaptive group testing in the linear regime, where the number of defective items scales linearly with the number of items. We analyse an algorithm based on generalized binary splitting. Provided fewer than half the items are defective, we achieve rates of over 0.9 bits per test for combinatorial zero-error testing, and over 0.95 bits per test for probabilistic small-error testing.