Seminar Details

Group testing has been widely used as a cost-effective strategy to screen for and estimate the prevalence of a rare disease. While it is well-recognized that retesting is necessary for identifying infected subjects, it is not required for estimating the prevalence. However, one can expect gains in statistical efficiency from incorporating retesting results in the estimation. Research in this context is scarce, particularly for tests with classification errors. For an imperfect test we show that retesting subjects in either positive or negative groups can substantially improve the efficiency of the estimates, and retesting positive groups yields higher efficiency than retesting a same number or proportion of negative groups. Moreover, when the test is subject to no misclassification, performing retesting on positive groups still results in more efficient estimates.