binGroup: A Package for Group Testing

Authors

Christopher R. Bilder, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Boan Zhang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Frank Schaarschmidt, Leibniz Universität Hannover
Joshua M. Tebbs, University of South Carolina

Date of this Version

12-2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (December 2010) 2(2)

Comments

Copyright 2010, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

When the prevalence of a disease or of some other binary characteristic is small, group testing (also known as pooled testing) is frequently used to estimate the prevalence and/or to identify individuals as positive or negative. We have developed the binGroup package as the first package designed to address the estimation problem in group testing. We present functions to estimate an overall prevalence for a homogeneous population. Also, for this set ting, we have functions to aid in the very important choice of the group size. When individuals come from a heterogeneous population, our group testing regression functions can be used to estimate an individual probability of disease positivity by using the group observations only. Weillustrate our functions with data from a multiple vector transfer design experiment and a human infectious disease prevalence study.