On the generation of factorial designs with minimum level changes

Abstract

Factorial experiments, wherein two or more factors each at two or more levels are used simultaneously, have profound applications in many fields of agricultural and allied sciences. These experiments allow studying the effect of each individual factor as well as the effects of interactions between factors on the response variable. In order to avoid any kind of bias in the estimation of these effects, it is always advisable that the order of execution of runs in a factorial design is random. However, experimentation under factorial setup may become expensive, time-consuming and difficult due to a large number of changes in factor levels induced by randomization. Adoption of factorial designs with minimum number of changes in the factor levels may prove to be useful in such situations in terms of cost and time. Present paper describes online software developed using client–server architecture for generation of cost effective factorial designs with minimum number of changes in the factor levels viz., webFMC and an R package named FMC.

Keywords:

• Factorial experiment
• Hard-to-change factors
• Minimum level change
• Randomization
• Web generation

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Professor Bikas K Sinha, Retired Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata with whom we had some fruitful discussion. The facilities provided by the Director, ICAR-IASRI, New Delhi is duly acknowledged. Authors are also grateful to Editor-in-chief, Associate Editor and the reviewer for their useful comments and suggestions for improving the quality of the manuscript.