Open AccessEstimation of prevalence in rare disease using pooled samples
Author(s) -
João Paulo Martins,
Rui Santos,
Miguel Felgueiras
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of physics. conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1742-6596
pISSN - 1742-6588
DOI - 10.1088/1742-6596/1564/1/012028
Subject(s) - estimation , statistics , computer science , medicine , machine learning , econometrics , mathematics , engineering , systems engineering
The use of pooled samples for screening infected individuals is a known procedure to reduce costs. In an estimation problem, the aim is only to determine how many individuals are infected instead of determining who is infected (classification problem). In that setting, our goal was to compare the performance of using one or two-dimensional arrays. The best performance was established according to one of the following criteria: minimizing the number of individuals or the number of tests required to attain a certain estimate accuracy. It is observed that when we want to minimize the number of individuals used, the two-dimensional procedures have a little advantage over the one-dimensional procedures. However, when the major concern is the cost, the one-dimensional procedures clearly outperform the two-dimensional procedures.