Saturday, April 27, 2024

Chapter 3 Blocking MATH3014-6027 Design and Analysis of Experiments

blocking design of experiments

Even though Latin Square guarantees that treatment A occurs once in the first, second and third period, we don't have all sequences represented. It is important to have all sequences represented when doing clinical trials with drugs. If we only have two treatments, we will want to balance the experiment so that half the subjects get treatment A first, and the other half get treatment B first. For example, if we had 10 subjects we might have half of them get treatment A and the other half get treatment B in the first period. After we assign the first treatment, A or B, and make our observation, we then assign our second treatment. There are 23 degrees of freedom total here so this is based on the full set of 24 observations.

Model

The function bibd generates BIBDs for given values of \(t\), \(b\), \(r\), \(k\) and \(\lambda\), or returns a message that a design is not available for those values. The box plots within each plot in Figure 3.1 are comparable, as every treatment has occured with every block the same number of times (once). For example, when we compare the box plots for treatments 1 and 3, we know each of then display one observation from each block. Therefore, differences between treatments will not be influenced by large differences between blocks. By eye, it appears here there may be differences between coating 3 and the other three coatings.

2.3 Contrasts

The blocking factor is then random, and we are not interested in contrasts involving its levels, for example, but rather use the blocking factor to increase precision and power by removing parts of the variation from treatment contrasts. To be effective, blocking requires that we find some property by which we can group our experimental units such that variances within each group are smaller than between groups. Given the multidimensionaland multidisciplinary nature of modern omics projects, it is essentialthat experts with the necessary expertise are involved early in theexperimental design, to prevent confounding effects. Finally, whileconsiderations of power are beyond the scope of this article, it cannotbe stressed enough that an adequate number of samples is paramount,both for correct experimental design and to ensure that the researchquestions can be answered.

3.7 Reference Designs

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But if some of the cows are done in the spring and others are done in the fall or summer, then the period effect has more meaning than simply the order. Although this represents order it may also involve other effects you need to be aware of this. A Case 3 approach involves estimating separate period effects within each square. Use the viewlet below to walk through an initial analysis of the data (cow_diets.mwx | cow_diets.csv) for this experiment with cow diets.

A balanced incomplete block design allows blocking of simple treatment structures if only a subset of treatments can be accommodated in each block. The latin square design requires identical number of levels for the row and column factors. We can use two blocking factors with a balanced incomplete block design to reduce the required number of levels for one of the two blocking factors. These designs are called Youden squares and only use a fraction of the treatment levels in each column (resp. row) and the full set of treatments in each row (resp. column). The idea was first proposed by Youden for studying inoculation of tobacco plants against the mosaic virus (Youden 1937), and his experiment layout is shown in Figure 7.16.

Otherwise, block-to-block differences may bias treatment comparisons and/or inflate our estimate of the background variability and hence reduce our ability to detect important treatment effects. To address nuisance variables, researchers can employ different methods such as blocking or randomization. Blocking involves grouping experimental units based on levels of the nuisance variable to control for its influence. Randomization helps distribute the effects of nuisance variables evenly across treatment groups.

3 Incomplete Block Designs

In this experiment, we are interested in contrasting the plates on the same patients, not the patients themselves. The ten plates are then the treatment factor levels, and each patient is a block to which we assign plates. The previous examples includedtwo groups of subjects where thetreatment was assumed to be the only difference, and where all samplescould be processed at the same time.

blocking design of experiments

Effectively, such a design uses a single blocking factor, where each level is a combination of lab and litter. We continue with our example of how three drug treatments in combination with two diets affect enzyme levels in mice. To keep things simple, we only consider the low fat diet for the moment, so the treatment structure only contains Drug with three levels. Our aim is to improve the precision of contrast estimates and increase the power of the omnibus \(F\)-test. To this end, we arrange (or block) mice into groups of three and randomize the drugs separately within each group, such that each drug occurs once per group. Ideally, the variance between animals in the same group is much smaller than between animals in different groups.

After that, the observational units from each block are evenly allocated into treatment groups in a way such that each treatment group is allocated similar numbers of observational units from each block. So what types of variables might you need to balance across your treatment groups? Blocking is most commonly used when you have at least one nuisance variable. A nuisance variable is an extraneous variable that is known to affect your outcome variable that you cannot otherwise control for in your experiment design. If nuisance variables are not evenly balanced across your treatment groups then it can be difficult to determine whether a difference in the outcome variable across treatment groups is due to the treatment or the nuisance variable. By extension, note that the trials for any K-factor randomized block design are simply the cell indices of a k dimensional matrix.

For example, suppose researchers want to understand the effect that a new diet has on weight less. The explanatory variable is the new diet and the response variable is the amount of weight loss. Four possible (ordered) batch compositionswith four groups anda batch size of three. Each celltype occurs in a batch alongside each other cell type exactly twice.

Another application of reference designs is the screening of several new treatments against a standard treatment. In this case, selected treatments might be compared among each other in a subsequent experiment, and removal of unpromising candidates in the first round might reduce these later efforts. However, a nuisance variable that will likely cause variation is gender. It’s likely that the gender of an individual will effect the amount of weight they’ll lose, regardless of whether the new diet works or not.

The foundational concepts of blocking date back to the early 20th century with statisticians like Ronald A. Fisher. His work in developing analysis of variance (ANOVA) set the groundwork for grouping experimental units to control for extraneous variables. An example layout of this design is shown in Figure 7.14A, where the two blocking factors are given as rows and columns.

And within each of the two blocks, we can randomly assign the patients to either the diet pill (treatment) or placebo pill (control). By blocking on sex, this source of variability is controlled, therefore, leading to greater interpretation of how the diet pills affect weight loss. Once the data are recorded, we are interested in quantifying how ‘good’ the blocking performed in the experiment. This information would allow us to better predict the expected residual variance for a power analysis of our next experiment and to determine if we should continue using the blocking factor.

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