Note on the offspring distribution for group testing in the linear regime

Gebhard, Oliver; Loick, Philipp

The group testing problem is concerned with identifying a small set of $k$ infected individuals in a large population of $n$ people. At our disposal is a testing scheme that can test groups of individuals. A test comes back positive if and only if at least one individual is infected. In this note, we lay groundwork for analysing belief propagation for group testing when $k$ scales linearly in $n$. To this end, we derive the offspring distribution for different types of individuals. With these distributions at hand, one can employ the population dynamics algorithm to simulate the posterior marginal distribution resulting from belief propagation.