Non-adaptive probabilistic group testing with noisy measurements: Near-optimal bounds with efficient algorithms

We consider the problem of detecting a small subset of defective items from a large set via non-adaptive "random pooling" group tests. We consider both the case when the measurements are noiseless, and the case when the measurements are noisy (the outcome of each group test may be independently faulty with probability q). Order-optimal results for these scenarios are known in the literature. We give information-theoretic lower bounds on the query complexity of these problems, and provide corresponding computationally efficient algorithms that match the lower bounds up to a constant factor. To the best of our knowledge this work is the first to explicitly estimate such a constant that characterizes the gap between the upper and lower bounds for these problems

A single-photon sampling architecture for solid-state imaging

Advances in solid-state technology have enabled the development of silicon photomultiplier sensor arrays capable of sensing individual photons. Combined with high-frequency time-to-digital converters (TDCs), this technology opens up the prospect of sensors capable of recording with high accuracy both the time and location of each detected photon. Such a capability could lead to significant improvements in imaging accuracy, especially for applications operating with low photon fluxes such as LiDAR and positron emission tomography. The demands placed on on-chip readout circuitry imposes stringent trade-offs between fill factor and spatio-temporal resolution, causing many contemporary designs to severely underutilize the technology's full potential. Concentrating on the low photon flux setting, this paper leverages results from group testing and proposes an architecture for a highly efficient readout of pixels using only a small number of TDCs, thereby also reducing both cost and power consumption. The design relies on a multiplexing technique based on binary interconnection matrices. We provide optimized instances of these matrices for various sensor parameters and give explicit upper and lower bounds on the number of TDCs required to uniquely decode a given maximum number of simultaneous photon arrivals. To illustrate the strength of the proposed architecture, we note a typical digitization result of a 120x120 photodiode sensor on a 30um x 30um pitch with a 40ps time resolution and an estimated fill factor of approximately 70%, using only 161 TDCs. The design guarantees registration and unique recovery of up to 4 simultaneous photon arrivals using a fast decoding algorithm. In a series of realistic simulations of scintillation events in clinical positron emission tomography the design was able to recover the spatio-temporal location of 98.6% of all photons that caused pixel firings.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

Near-Optimal Noisy Group Testing via Separate Decoding of Items

The group testing problem consists of determining a small set of defective items from a larger set of items based on a number of tests, and is relevant in applications such as medical testing, communication protocols, pattern matching, and more. In this paper, we revisit an efficient algorithm for noisy group testing in which each item is decoded separately (Malyutov and Mateev, 1980), and develop novel performance guarantees via an information-theoretic framework for general noise models. For the special cases of no noise and symmetric noise, we find that the asymptotic number of tests required for vanishing error probability is within a factor $\log 2 \approx 0.7$ of the information-theoretic optimum at low sparsity levels, and that with a small fraction of allowed incorrectly decoded items, this guarantee extends to all sublinear sparsity levels. In addition, we provide a converse bound showing that if one tries to move slightly beyond our low-sparsity achievability threshold using separate decoding of items and i.i.d. randomized testing, the average number of items decoded incorrectly approaches that of a trivial decoder.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processin

Noise-Resilient Group Testing: Limitations and Constructions

We study combinatorial group testing schemes for learning $d$-sparse Boolean vectors using highly unreliable disjunctive measurements. We consider an adversarial noise model that only limits the number of false observations, and show that any noise-resilient scheme in this model can only approximately reconstruct the sparse vector. On the positive side, we take this barrier to our advantage and show that approximate reconstruction (within a satisfactory degree of approximation) allows us to break the information theoretic lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(d^2 \log n)$ that is known for exact reconstruction of $d$-sparse vectors of length $n$ via non-adaptive measurements, by a multiplicative factor $\tilde{\Omega}(d)$. Specifically, we give simple randomized constructions of non-adaptive measurement schemes, with $m=O(d \log n)$ measurements, that allow efficient reconstruction of $d$-sparse vectors up to $O(d)$ false positives even in the presence of $\delta m$ false positives and $O(m/d)$ false negatives within the measurement outcomes, for any constant $\delta < 1$. We show that, information theoretically, none of these parameters can be substantially improved without dramatically affecting the others. Furthermore, we obtain several explicit constructions, in particular one matching the randomized trade-off but using $m = O(d^{1+o(1)} \log n)$ measurements. We also obtain explicit constructions that allow fast reconstruction in time \poly(m), which would be sublinear in $n$ for sufficiently sparse vectors. The main tool used in our construction is the list-decoding view of randomness condensers and extractors.Comment: Full version. A preliminary summary of this work appears (under the same title) in proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory (FCT 2009

Cross-Sender Bit-Mixing Coding

Scheduling to avoid packet collisions is a long-standing challenge in networking, and has become even trickier in wireless networks with multiple senders and multiple receivers. In fact, researchers have proved that even {\em perfect} scheduling can only achieve $\mathbf{R} = O(\frac{1}{\ln N})$. Here $N$ is the number of nodes in the network, and $\mathbf{R}$ is the {\em medium utilization rate}. Ideally, one would hope to achieve $\mathbf{R} = \Theta(1)$, while avoiding all the complexities in scheduling. To this end, this paper proposes {\em cross-sender bit-mixing coding} ({\em BMC}), which does not rely on scheduling. Instead, users transmit simultaneously on suitably-chosen slots, and the amount of overlap in different user's slots is controlled via coding. We prove that in all possible network topologies, using BMC enables us to achieve $\mathbf{R}=\Theta(1)$. We also prove that the space and time complexities of BMC encoding/decoding are all low-order polynomials.Comment: Published in the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 201

Noisy Non-Adaptive Group Testing: A (Near-)Definite Defectives Approach

The group testing problem consists of determining a small set of defective items from a larger set of items based on a number of possibly-noisy tests, and is relevant in applications such as medical testing, communication protocols, pattern matching, and many more. We study the noisy version of the problem, where the output of each standard noiseless group test is subject to independent noise, corresponding to passing the noiseless result through a binary channel. We introduce a class of algorithms that we refer to as Near-Definite Defectives (NDD), and study bounds on the required number of tests for vanishing error probability under Bernoulli random test designs. In addition, we study algorithm-independent converse results, giving lower bounds on the required number of tests under Bernoulli test designs. Under reverse $Z$-channel noise, the achievable rates and converse results match in a broad range of sparsity regimes, and under $Z$-channel noise, the two match in a narrower range of dense/low-noise regimes. We observe that although these two channels have the same Shannon capacity when viewed as a communication channel, they can behave quite differently when it comes to group testing. Finally, we extend our analysis of these noise models to the symmetric noise model, and show improvements over the best known existing bounds in broad scaling regimes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Non-adaptive Group Testing: Explicit bounds and novel algorithms

We consider some computationally efficient and provably correct algorithms with near-optimal sample-complexity for the problem of noisy non-adaptive group testing. Group testing involves grouping arbitrary subsets of items into pools. Each pool is then tested to identify the defective items, which are usually assumed to be "sparse". We consider non-adaptive randomly pooling measurements, where pools are selected randomly and independently of the test outcomes. We also consider a model where noisy measurements allow for both some false negative and some false positive test outcomes (and also allow for asymmetric noise, and activation noise). We consider three classes of algorithms for the group testing problem (we call them specifically the "Coupon Collector Algorithm", the "Column Matching Algorithms", and the "LP Decoding Algorithms" -- the last two classes of algorithms (versions of some of which had been considered before in the literature) were inspired by corresponding algorithms in the Compressive Sensing literature. The second and third of these algorithms have several flavours, dealing separately with the noiseless and noisy measurement scenarios. Our contribution is novel analysis to derive explicit sample-complexity bounds -- with all constants expressly computed -- for these algorithms as a function of the desired error probability; the noise parameters; the number of items; and the size of the defective set (or an upper bound on it). We also compare the bounds to information-theoretic lower bounds for sample complexity based on Fano's inequality and show that the upper and lower bounds are equal up to an explicitly computable universal constant factor (independent of problem parameters).Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; current version, Oct. 9, 2012. Main change from v4 to v5: fixed some typos, corrected details of the LP decoding algorithm