Lesson 4: Design of Experiments: Plan Experiments.
Mukul Mehta, Cleveland, Ohio
In the previous lesson we talked about Establishing Experimental Reproducibility.
Now, we will talk about how to plan your experiments.
Imagine you are planning a road trip. You are going to drive from Cleveland to Boston. You can get a set of directions from Google Maps, MapQuest or even a GPS system. Sometimes, the old fashioned map is better. You open an interstate roadmap map. locate the starting point, say Cleveland, my hometown, and then the destination, Boston. You identify the shortest route, the fastest route and sometimes a few alternatives. Then, you select one that makes the most sense. Remember the roadmap analogy. It is a very useful analogy.
Planning Experiments, or more precisely and technically speaking, designing experiments, is similar.
Quite often, we already know the starting point. What performance we are getting today with the current experimental conditions?
We know the destination, the goal. See “Lesson 2. Define the Project” If you need a refresher.
However, we have a problem. We cannot use the roadmap. The roadmap does not exist.
So now we have a bigger challenge. We have to build the road map.
The road maps are drawn on a piece of paper. Typically in a horizontal direction, left to right is West to East; the vertical direction, from top to bottom, is North to South. The map is two dimensional. We have a much bigger problem. Our problem is multidimensional. We want to study several variables (eight for the cheesecake problem – Lesson 2). We will also need a map for each performance characteristic we are interested in. We can lay all these property maps side by side and identify the right combination.
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Take care.
Mukul Mehta
Mukul Mehta & Associates
25797 Briarwood Court
Cleveland, Ohio, 44145 USA
Phone: 440-808-6700 Fax: 440-808-6767
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