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Record W4403215990 · doi:10.1145/3699824.3699829

Welfare-Maximizing Pooled Testing

2024· article· en· W4403215990 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueACM SIGecom Exchanges · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMachine Learning and Algorithms
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWelfareEconometricsComputer scienceEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This letter provides an overview of our recent work on COVID-19 testing mechanisms that appeared at EC'23. Large-scale testing is crucial in pandemics but resources are often prohibitively constrained. We study a scenario in which a population under lockdown utilizes a limited budget of tests to allow healthy individuals to resume in-person activities. Our work explores the optimal allocation of pooled tests in populations that are heterogeneous with respect to individual infection probabilities and utilities that materialize if included in a negative test (and being permitted to resume in-person activities). Non-overlapping allocations of tests, where no individual in the population is included in more than one pooled test, are both conceptually and logistically simpler to implement. We show that the welfare gain from overlapping testing over non-overlapping testing is bounded. Moreover, we design a heuristic mechanism for finding test allocations that is fast and empirically near-optimal. We also implement our mechanism in practice and provide experimental evidence on the benefits of utility-weighted pooled testing in a real-world setting. Our randomized trial at a higher education research institute in Mexico suggests that performance and mental health outcomes of participants under our testing mechanism are no worse than under the counterfactual of full access for individuals without testing.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.982
Threshold uncertainty score0.620

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.278
Teacher spread0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it