Dynamic SAFFRON: Disease Control Over Time Via Group Testing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic group testing algorithm called SAFFRON for controlling disease spread over time, focusing on efficiently utilizing testing capacity rather than identifying every infection.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel dynamic SAFFRON group testing algorithm and a new performance metric, epsilon-disease control time, for disease spread management.

Findings

Theoretical analysis of the dynamic SAFFRON algorithm.

Comparison showing improved control time over baseline methods.

Validation through simulations demonstrating effectiveness.

Abstract

We consider the dynamic infection spread model that is based on the discrete SIR model which assumes infections to be spread over time via infected and non-isolated individuals. In our system, the main objective is not to minimize the number of required tests to identify every infection, but instead, to utilize the available, given testing capacity $T$ at each time instance to efficiently control the infection spread. We introduce and study a novel performance metric, which we coin as $\epsilon$-disease control time. This metric can be used to measure how fast a given algorithm can control the spread of a disease. We characterize the performance of dynamic individual testing algorithm and introduce a novel dynamic SAFFRON based group testing algorithm. We present theoretical results and implement the proposed algorithms to compare their performances.