Estimating Disease Prevalence Using Inverse Binomial Pooled Testing

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Abstract

Monitoring populations of hosts as well as insect vectors is an important part of agricultural and public health risk assessment. In applications where pathogen prevalence is likely low, it is common to test pools of subjects for the presence of infection, rather than to test subjects individually. This technique is known as pooled (group) testing. In this paper, we revisit the problem of estimating the population prevalence p from pooled testing, but we consider applications where inverse binomial sampling is used. Our work is unlike previous research in pooled testing, which has largely assumed a binomial model. Inverse sampling is natural to implement when there is a need to report estimates early on in the data collection process and has been used in individual testing applications when disease incidence is low. We consider point and interval estimation procedures for p in this new pooled testing setting, and we use example data sets from the literature to describe and to illustrate our methods.

Key Words

Foot and mouth disease Geometric distribution Group testing Maximum likelihood Negative binomial distribution Prevalence West Nile virus 
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Copyright information

© International Biometric Society 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Mathematics and StatisticsCoastal Carolina UniversityConwayUSA
  2. 2.Department of StatisticsUniversity of South CarolinaColumbiaUSA

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