On a Parity Based Group Testing Algorithm

In traditional Combinatorial Group Testing the problem is to identify up to d defective items from a set of n items on the basis of group tests. In this paper we describe a variant of the group testing problem above, which we call parity group testing. The problem is to identify up to d defective items from a set of n items as in the classical group test problem. The main difference is that we check the parity of the defective items in a subset. The test can be applied to an arbitrary subset of the n items with two possible outcomes. The test is positive if the number of defective items in the subset is odd, otherwise it is negative. In this paper we extend Hirschberg et al.’s method to the parity group testing scenario.