Related papers: Group Testing under Superspreading Dynamics
We consider two closely related problems: anomaly detection in sensor networks and testing for infections in human populations. In both problems, we have $n$ nodes (sensors, humans), and each node exhibits an event of interest (anomaly,…
We formulate and analyze a stochastic threshold group testing problem motivated by biological applications. Here a set of $n$ items contains a subset of $d \ll n$ defective items. Subsets (pools) of the $n$ items are tested -- the test…
Repeat asymptomatic testing in order to identify and quarantine infectious individuals has become a widely-used intervention to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In some workplaces, and in particular health and social care settings with…
We consider a new group testing model wherein each item is a binary random variable defined by an a priori probability of being defective. We assume that each probability is small and that items are independent, but not necessarily…
Tracing potentially infected contacts of confirmed cases is important when fighting outbreaks of many infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated researchers to examine how different contact tracing strategies compare in terms…
Efficient personnel scheduling plays a significant role in matching workload demand in organizations. However, staff scheduling is sometimes affected by unexpected events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, that disrupt regular operations.…
During the early months of the current COVID-19 pandemic, social-distancing measures effectively slowed disease transmission in many countries in Europe and Asia, but the same benefits have not been observed in some developing countries…
The COVID-19 pandemic provides new motivation for a classic problem in epidemiology: estimating the empirical rate of transmission during an outbreak (formally, the time-varying reproduction number) from case counts. While standard methods…
There is growing interest in technology-enabled contact tracing, the process of identifying potentially infected COVID-19 patients by notifying all recent contacts of an infected person. Governments, technology companies, and research…
In the search for genetic factors that are associated with complex heritable human traits, considerable attention is now being focused on rare variants that individually have small effects. In response, numerous recent papers have proposed…
Multiple lines of evidence strongly suggest that infection hotspots, where a single individual infects many others, play a key role in the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. However, most of the existing epidemiological models fail to…
We discuss an "operational" approach to testing convex composite hypotheses when the underlying distributions are heavy-tailed. It relies upon Euclidean separation of convex sets and can be seen as an extension of the approach to testing by…
COVID-19 has created a pandemic around the world, paused the path of building the future, and still ongoing without having any long-term solution shortly. The time taken in vaccine distribution is too slow compared to the spread of…
We modify Cheraghchi-Nakos [CN20] and Price-Scarlett's [PS20] fast binary splitting approach to nonadaptive group testing. We show that, to identify a uniformly random subset of $k$ infected persons among a population of $n$, it takes only…
In the classical combinatorial (adaptive) group testing problem, one is given two integers \(d\) and \(n\), where \(0\le d\le n\), and a population of \(n\) items, exactly \(d\) of which are known to be defective. The question is to devise…
Inspired by applications in testing for Covid-19, we consider a variant of two-stage group testing called "conservative" (or "trivial") two-stage testing, where every item declared to be defective must be definitively confirmed by being…
This paper aims to provide reliable estimates for the COVID-19 contact rate of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. From observable data on confirmed, recovered, and deceased cases, a noisy measurement for the contact rate can be…
We introduce an extended SEIR infectious disease model with data assimilation for the study of the spread of COVID-19. In this framework, undetected asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases are taken into account, and the impact of their…
Contact Tracing (CT) is one of the measures taken by government and health officials to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. In this paper, we investigate its efficacy by developing a compartmental model for assessing its impact on…
Contagion processes on networks, including disease spreading, information diffusion, or social behaviors propagation, can be modeled as simple contagion, i.e. involving one connection at a time, or as complex contagion, in which multiple…