A supersaturated design is a design whose run size is not large enough for
estimating all the main effects. The goodness of multi-level supersaturated
designs can be judged by the generalized minimum aberration criterion proposed
by Xu and Wu [Ann. Statist. 29 (2001) 1066--1077]. A new lower bound is derived
and general construction methods are proposed for multi-level supersaturated
designs. Inspired by the Addelman--Kempthorne construction of orthogonal
arrays, several classes of optimal multi-level supersaturated designs are given
in explicit form: Columns are labeled with linear or quadratic polynomials and
rows are points over a finite field. Additive characters are used to study the
properties of resulting designs. Some small optimal supersaturated designs of
3, 4 and 5 levels are listed with their properties.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053605000000688 in the
Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org