Design of Experiments - Experimental Designs After Fisher

Experimental Designs After Fisher

Some efficient designs for estimating several main effects simultaneously were found by Raj Chandra Bose and K. Kishen in 1940 at the Indian Statistical Institute, but remained little known until the Plackett-Burman designs were published in Biometrika in 1946. About the same time, C. R. Rao introduced the concepts of orthogonal arrays as experimental designs. This was a concept which played a central role in the development of Taguchi methods by Genichi Taguchi, which took place during his visit to Indian Statistical Institute in early 1950s. His methods were successfully applied and adopted by Japanese and Indian industries and subsequently were also embraced by US industry albeit with some reservations.

In 1950, Gertrude Mary Cox and William Gemmell Cochran published the book Experimental Designs which became the major reference work on the design of experiments for statisticians for years afterwards.

Developments of the theory of linear models have encompassed and surpassed the cases that concerned early writers. Today, the theory rests on advanced topics in linear algebra, algebra and combinatorics.

As with other branches of statistics, experimental design is pursued using both frequentist and Bayesian approaches: In evaluating statistical procedures like experimental designs, frequentist statistics studies the sampling distribution while Bayesian statistics updates a probability distribution on the parameter space.

Some important contributors to the field of experimental designs are C. S. Peirce, R. A. Fisher, F. Yates, C. R. Rao, R. C. Bose, J. N. Srivastava, Shrikhande S. S., D. Raghavarao, W. G. Cochran, O. Kempthorne, W. T. Federer, V. V. Fedorov, A. S. Hedayat, J. A. Nelder, R. A. Bailey, J. Kiefer, W. J. Studden, A. Pázman, F. Pukelsheim, D. R. Cox, H. P. Wynn, A. C. Atkinson, G. E. P. Box and G. Taguchi. The textbooks of D. Montgomery and R. Myers have reached generations of students and practitioners.