Factorial Experiments: Blocking, Confounding, and Fractional Factorial Designs

Course Topics

Experimentation is a vital part of the scientific method. Most problems in science require observation of the system at work and experimentation to elucidate information about how the system works.

In many situation, experimenters are required to study the effects of two or more factors, in which in each complete trial or replicate of the experiment all possible combinations of the levels of the factors are investigated. The situation is often referred as crossed experiments or factorial experiments. However, this is sometimes limited by the available resources.

This short course will cover ways to handle situations when it is impossible to perform all of the runs of the factorial experiments under homogenous conditions. It will also cover the screening experiments in which many factors are considered and the objective is to identify those factors (if any) that have large effects. We will work with data set from an experiment carried in a pilot plant to study the factors thought to influence the filtration rate of a chemical product (Montgomery, 2013).

This short course is open to all, but the audience is assumed to be knowledgeable in ANOVA and basic principles of designing an experiment. However, regardless to these a quick introduction to design of experiments will be given.

Montgomery, D.C (2013). Design and analysis of experiments. Wiley, New York.

LISA Short Course: Factorial Experiments: Blocking, Confounding, and Fractional Factorial Designs, Part I from LISA on Vimeo.

LISA Short Course: Factorial Experiments: Blocking, Confounding, and Fractional Factorial Designs, Part II from LISA on Vimeo.