DIMACS TR: 93-51
Operating Manual for Gosset: A General-Purpose Program for
Constructing Experimental Designs (Second Edition)
Authors: R. H. Hardin and N. J. A. Sloane
ABSTRACT
This is the second edition of the operating manual for Gosset,
a flexible and powerful computer program for constructing experimental designs.
Many new features have been added. Variables may be discrete or
continuous (or both), discrete variables may be numeric or symbolic
(or both), and continuous variables may range over a cube or a ball (or both).
The variables may be required to satisfy linear equalities or inequalities,
and the model to be fitted may be any low degree polynomial (e.g. a quadratic).
The number of observations is specified by the user.
The design may be required to include a specified set of points
(so a sequence of designs can be found, each of which is optimal
given that the earlier measurements have been made).
The region where the model is to be fitted need not be the same
as the region where measurements are to be made (so the designs can be used for
interpolation or extrapolation).
The following types of designs can be requested:
I-, A-, D- or E-optimal; the same but with protection
against the loss of one run; or packings (when no model is available).
Block designs, and designs with correlated errors can also be constructed.
The algorithm is powerful enough to routinely minimize functions
of 1000 variables (e.g. can find optimal or nearly optimal designs
for a quadratic model involving 12 variables).
An extensive library of precomputed optimal designs
is included for linear and quadratic designs in the cube, ball and simplex.
The user does not have to specify starting points for the search.
The user also has control over how much effort is expended by the algorithm,
and can monitor the progress of the search.
Applications so far include VLSI production, conductivity of diamond films,
growth of protein crystals, flow through a catalytic converter,
laser welding, etc.
Paper available at:
ftp://dimacs.rutgers.edu/pub/dimacs/TechnicalReports/TechReports/1993/93-51.ps
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