  The group testing problem consists of determining a small set of defective
items from a larger set of items based on a number of tests, and is relevant in
applications such as medical testing, communication protocols, pattern
matching, and more. In this paper, we revisit an efficient algorithm for noisy
group testing in which each item is decoded separately (Malyutov and Mateev,
1980), and develop novel performance guarantees via an information-theoretic
framework for general noise models. For the special cases of no noise and
symmetric noise, we find that the asymptotic number of tests required for
vanishing error probability is within a factor $\log 2 \approx 0.7$ of the
information-theoretic optimum at low sparsity levels, and that with a small
fraction of allowed incorrectly decoded items, this guarantee extends to all
sublinear sparsity levels. In addition, we provide a converse bound showing
that if one tries to move slightly beyond our low-sparsity achievability
threshold using separate decoding of items and i.i.d. randomized testing, the
average number of items decoded incorrectly approaches that of a trivial
decoder.
