In a \emph{group testing} scheme, a set of tests is designed to identify a
small number t of defective items among a large set (of size N) of items.
In the non-adaptive scenario the set of tests has to be designed in one-shot.
In this setting, designing a testing scheme is equivalent to the construction
of a \emph{disjunct matrix}, an MΓN matrix where the union of supports
of any t columns does not contain the support of any other column. In
principle, one wants to have such a matrix with minimum possible number M of
rows (tests). One of the main ways of constructing disjunct matrices relies on
\emph{constant weight error-correcting codes} and their \emph{minimum
distance}. In this paper, we consider a relaxed definition of a disjunct matrix
known as \emph{almost disjunct matrix}. This concept is also studied under the
name of \emph{weakly separated design} in the literature. The relaxed
definition allows one to come up with group testing schemes where a
close-to-one fraction of all possible sets of defective items are identifiable.
Our main contribution is twofold. First, we go beyond the minimum distance
analysis and connect the \emph{average distance} of a constant weight code to
the parameters of an almost disjunct matrix constructed from it. Our second
contribution is to explicitly construct almost disjunct matrices based on our
average distance analysis, that have much smaller number of rows than any
previous explicit construction of disjunct matrices. The parameters of our
construction can be varied to cover a large range of relations for t and N.Comment: 15 Page