In the classical non-adaptive group testing setup, pools of items are tested
together, and the main goal of a recovery algorithm is to identify the
"complete defective set" given the outcomes of different group tests. In
contrast, the main goal of a "non-defective subset recovery" algorithm is to
identify a "subset" of non-defective items given the test outcomes. In this
paper, we present a suite of computationally efficient and analytically
tractable non-defective subset recovery algorithms. By analyzing the
probability of error of the algorithms, we obtain bounds on the number of tests
required for non-defective subset recovery with arbitrarily small probability
of error. Our analysis accounts for the impact of both the additive noise
(false positives) and dilution noise (false negatives). By comparing with the
information theoretic lower bounds, we show that the upper bounds on the number
of tests are order-wise tight up to a log2K factor, where K is the number
of defective items. We also provide simulation results that compare the
relative performance of the different algorithms and provide further insights
into their practical utility. The proposed algorithms significantly outperform
the straightforward approaches of testing items one-by-one, and of first
identifying the defective set and then choosing the non-defective items from
the complement set, in terms of the number of measurements required to ensure a
given success rate.Comment: In this revision: Unified some proofs and reorganized the paper,
corrected a small mistake in one of the proofs, added more reference