EE-optimal designs for second-order response surface models

$E$-optimal experimental designs for a second-order response surface model with $k\geq1$ predictors are investigated. If the design space is the $k$-dimensional unit cube, Galil and Kiefer [J. Statist. Plann. Inference 1 (1977a) 121-132] determined optimal designs in a restricted class of designs (defined by the multiplicity of the minimal eigenvalue) and stated their universal optimality as a conjecture. In this paper, we prove this claim and show that these designs are in fact $E$-optimal in the class of all approximate designs. Moreover, if the design space is the unit ball, $E$-optimal designs have not been found so far and we also provide a complete solution to this optimal design problem. The main difficulty in the construction of $E$-optimal designs for the second-order response surface model consists in the fact that for the multiplicity of the minimum eigenvalue of the "optimal information matrix" is larger than one (in contrast to the case $k=1$) and as a consequence the corresponding optimality criterion is not differentiable at the optimal solution. These difficulties are solved by considering nonlinear Chebyshev approximation problems, which arise from a corresponding equivalence theorem. The extremal polynomials which solve these Chebyshev problems are constructed explicitly leading to a complete solution of the corresponding $E$-optimal design problems.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOS1241 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Implementing Brouwer's database of strongly regular graphs

Andries Brouwer maintains a public database of existence results for strongly regular graphs on $n\leq 1300$ vertices. We implemented most of the infinite families of graphs listed there in the open-source software Sagemath, as well as provided constructions of the "sporadic" cases, to obtain a graph for each set of parameters with known examples. Besides providing a convenient way to verify these existence results from the actual graphs, it also extends the database to higher values of $n$.Comment: 18 pages, LaTe

Complex spherical codes with two inner products

A finite set $X$ in a complex sphere is called a complex spherical $2$-code if the number of inner products between two distinct vectors in $X$ is equal to $2$. In this paper, we characterize the tight complex spherical $2$-codes by doubly regular tournaments, or skew Hadamard matrices. We also give certain maximal 2-codes relating to skew-symmetric $D$-optimal designs. To prove them, we show the smallest embedding dimension of a tournament into a complex sphere by the multiplicity of the smallest or second-smallest eigenvalue of the Seidel matrix.Comment: 10 pages, to appear in European Journal of Combinatoric