Recent Developments in Nonregular Fractional Factorial Designs

Nonregular fractional factorial designs such as Plackett-Burman designs and other orthogonal arrays are widely used in various screening experiments for their run size economy and flexibility. The traditional analysis focuses on main effects only. Hamada and Wu (1992) went beyond the traditional approach and proposed an analysis strategy to demonstrate that some interactions could be entertained and estimated beyond a few significant main effects. Their groundbreaking work stimulated much of the recent developments in design criterion creation, construction and analysis of nonregular designs. This paper reviews important developments in optimality criteria and comparison, including projection properties, generalized resolution, various generalized minimum aberration criteria, optimality results, construction methods and analysis strategies for nonregular designs.Comment: Submitted to the Statistics Surveys (http://www.i-journals.org/ss/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Complete enumeration of two-Level orthogonal arrays of strength dd with d+2d+2 constraints

Enumerating nonisomorphic orthogonal arrays is an important, yet very difficult, problem. Although orthogonal arrays with a specified set of parameters have been enumerated in a number of cases, general results are extremely rare. In this paper, we provide a complete solution to enumerating nonisomorphic two-level orthogonal arrays of strength $d$ with $d+2$ constraints for any $d$ and any run size $n=\lambda2^d$. Our results not only give the number of nonisomorphic orthogonal arrays for given $d$ and $n$, but also provide a systematic way of explicitly constructing these arrays. Our approach to the problem is to make use of the recently developed theory of $J$-characteristics for fractional factorial designs. Besides the general theoretical results, the paper presents some results from applications of the theory to orthogonal arrays of strength two, three and four.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000001325 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Selection of non-regular fractional factorial designs when some two-factor interactions are important

Introduction: Non-regular two-level fractional factorial designs, such as Placket-Burman designs, are becoming popular choices in many areas of scientific investigation due to their run size economy and flexibility. The run size of non-regular two-level factorial designs is a multiple of 4. They fill the gaps left by the regular two-level fractional factorial designs whose run size is always a power of 2 (4, 8, 16, 32, ...). In non-regular factorial designs each main effect is partially confounded with all the two-factor interactions not involving itself. Because of this complex aliasing structure, non-regular factorial designs had not received sufficient attention until recently. ... In practical applications of non-regular designs, it is often in the case that some of the two-factor interactions are important and need to be estimated in addition to the main effects. In this article, we consider how to select non-regular two-level fractional factorial designs when some of the two-factor interactions are presumably important. We propose and study a method to select the optimal non-regular two-level fractional factorial designs in the situation that some of the two-factor interactions are potentially important. We then discuss how to search for the best designs according to this method and present some results for the Plackett-Burman design of 12 runs.Includes bibliographical references

Quarter-fraction factorial designs constructed via quaternary codes

The research of developing a general methodology for the construction of good nonregular designs has been very active in the last decade. Recent research by Xu and Wong [Statist. Sinica 17 (2007) 1191--1213] suggested a new class of nonregular designs constructed from quaternary codes. This paper explores the properties and uses of quaternary codes toward the construction of quarter-fraction nonregular designs. Some theoretical results are obtained regarding the aliasing structure of such designs. Optimal designs are constructed under the maximum resolution, minimum aberration and maximum projectivity criteria. These designs often have larger generalized resolution and larger projectivity than regular designs of the same size. It is further shown that some of these designs have generalized minimum aberration and maximum projectivity among all possible designs.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS656 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org