Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Experimental Design and Blocking

blocked experimental design

So if you don’t block, you will reduce the statistical power of the study. Further, the degrees of freedom affect the t-distribution that is used for inference, which has broader tails if the residual degrees of freedom \(n-p\) are getting smaller. Hence, the power gain of the RCB is a trade-off between the variability that can be explained by the block effect and the loss in DF. In the most basic form, we assume that we do not have replicateswithin a block.

Assign treatments to blocks

If the experimenter focuses exclusively on the differences between treatments, the effects due to variations between the different blocks should be eliminated. When we have missing data, it affects the average of the remaining treatments in a row, i.e., when complete data does not exist for each row - this affects the means. When we have complete data the block effect and the column effects both drop out of the analysis since they are orthogonal. With missing data or IBDs that are not orthogonal, even BIBD where orthogonality does not exist, the analysis requires us to use GLM which codes the data like we did previously.

Table

blocked experimental design

Since each treatment occurs once in each block, the number of test specimens is the number of replicates. The single design we looked at so far is the completely randomized design (CRD) where we only have a single factor. In the CRD setting we simply randomly assign the treatments to the available experimental units in our experiment. A randomized block design is a type of experiment where participants who share certain characteristics are grouped together to form blocks, and then the treatment (or intervention) gets randomly assigned within each block.

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Randomized Block Design: An Introduction

However, you generally cannot make any stronger conclusions from the test on a block factor, because you may not have randomly selected the blocks from any population, nor randomly assigned the levels. Since \(\lambda\) is not an integer there does not exist a balanced incomplete block design for this experiment. Seeing as how the block size in this case is fixed, we can achieve a balanced complete block design by adding more replicates so that \(\lambda\) equals at least 1. It needs to be a whole number in order for the design to be balanced. Here we have treatments 1, 2, up to t and the blocks 1, 2, up to b.

To conduct this experiment we assign the tips to an experimental unit; that is, to a test specimen (called a coupon), which is a piece of metal on which the tip is tested. In this example we wish to determine whether 4 different tips (the treatment factor) produce different (mean) hardness readings on a Rockwell hardness tester. The treatment factor is the design of the tip for the machine that determines the hardness of metal. Note, that the analysis where we ignore that we have multiple technical repeats for each bio-repeat returns results that are much more significant because we act as if we have much more independent observations. Note, that the power is slightly different because for the power.t.test function we conditioned on the mice from our study.

2 Randomized Complete Block Designs

We can also think about period as the order in which the drugs are administered. One sense of balance is simply to be sure that each treatment occurs at least one time in each period. If we add subjects in sets of complete Latin squares then we retain the orthogonality that we have with a single square. Situations where you should use a Latin Square are where you have a single treatment factor and you have two blocking or nuisance factors to consider, which can have the same number of levels as the treatment factor. The original use of the term block for removing a source of variation comes from agriculture.

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Randomly dividing the subjects into the 2 groups is the most likely to make the treatment and control groups as alike as possible because it eliminates human bias. Not only differences that the researcher has identified as relevant, but on all characteristics, including the hidden ones that the researcher might not realize are important. However, this method of constructing a BIBD using all possible combinations, does not always work as we now demonstrate.

In other words, both of these factors would be nested within the replicates of the experiment. For instance, we might do this experiment all in the same factory using the same machines and the same operators for these machines. The first replicate would occur during the first week, the second replicate would occur during the second week, etc. Week one would be replication one, week two would be replication two and week three would be replication three. In this experiment, each specimen is called a “block”; thus, we have designed a more homogenous set of experimental units on which to test the tips. Often in medical studies, the blocking factor used is the type of institution.

blocked experimental design

Analysis of Variance:Table of Contents

This is followed by a period of time, often called a washout period, to allow any effects to go away or dissipate. This is followed by a second treatment, followed by an equal period of time, then the second observation. We let the row be the machines, the column be the operator, (just as before) and the Greek letter the day, (you could also think of this as the order in which it was produced). Therefore the Greek letter could serve the multiple purposes as the day effect or the order effect. As the treatments were assigned you should have noticed that the treatments have become confounded with the days. Days of the week are not all the same, Monday is not always the best day of the week!

One common way to control for the effect of nuisance variables is through blocking, which involves splitting up individuals in an experiment based on the value of some nuisance variable. If you look at how we have coded data here, we have another column called residual treatment. For the first six observations, we have just assigned this a value of 0 because there is no residual treatment. But for the first observation in the second row, we have labeled this with a value of one indicating that this was the treatment prior to the current treatment (treatment A). In this way the data is coded such that this column indicates the treatment given in the prior period for that cow. We have not randomized these, although you would want to do that, and we do show the third square different from the rest.

To conduct this experiment as a RCBD, we need to assign all 4 pressures at random to each of the 6 batches of resin. Each batch of resin is called a “block”, since a batch is a more homogenous set of experimental units on which to test the extrusion pressures. Below is a table which provides percentages of those products that met the specifications. In studies involving human subjects, we often use gender and age classes as the blocking factors. We could simply divide our subjects into age classes, however this does not consider gender.

Notice that pressure is the treatment factor and batch is the block factor. The RCBD utilizes an additive model – one in which there is no interaction between treatments and blocks. The error term in a randomized complete block model reflects how the treatment effect varies from one block to another. The partitioning of the variation of the sum of squares and the corresponding partitioning of the degrees of freedom provides the basis for our orthogonal analysis of variance. The next thing you need to do after you determine your blocking factors is allocate your observations into blocks.

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