Design-Ease 8
Introduction
Design-Ease is an entry-level program for design and analysis of factorial screening experiments. It is a 'light' version of the much more comprehensive Design-Expert software from Stat-Ease (which offers response surface methods (RSM) and mixture designs for product formulators). Use Design-Ease software to detect main effects and interactions that lead to breakthrough improvements. A few of version 8's many new features include upfront power calculations for factorial designs, the option of displaying grid lines on 3D graph back planes, and Min-Run Res V designs up to 50 factors.
Features
A Variety of Design Creation Tools to Meet All Your Experimental Needs:
- Upfront power calculation for factorial designs: This mainstreams in the design-builder a ‘heads-up’ on the percent probability of seeing the desired difference in each response—the signal—based on the underlying variability—the noise.
- “Min-Run Res V” designs are now available for 6 to 50 factors: Resolve two-factor interactions (2FI's) in the least runs possible while maintaining a balance in low versus high levels.
- “Min-Run Res IV” (two-level factorial) designs for 5 to 50 factors: Screen main effects with maximum efficiency in terms of experimental runs.
- Two-level full and fractional factorials for up to 512 runs and 21 factors, along with minimum-aberration blocking choices: Build large designs.
- New “Color By” option: Color-code points on graphs according to the level of another factor—a great way to incorporate another piece of information into a graph.
- General (multilevel) factorial designs (up to 32,766 runs) using factors with mixed levels.
- High-resolution irregular fractions, such as 4 factors in 12 runs.
- Placket-Burman designs for 11, 19, 23, 27 or 31 factors in up to 64 runs respectively.
- Taguchi orthogonal arrays.
- Ability to graph any two columns of data on the XY graph (this is a great way to view a blocked effect).
- Easy-to-use automatic or manual model reduction.
- Ability to easily analyze designs with botched or missing data.
- Design-builder updates resolution of two-level fractional factorials when the number of blocks is changed: Immediately see how segmenting a design might reduce its ability to resolve effects.
- Block names are now entered during the design build: Identify how you will break up your experiment, for example by specific shift, material lot or the like.
- “Min-Run Res IV plus two” option: Ask for two extra runs to make your experiment more robust to missing data.
- User-defined base factors for design generators: You have more flexibility to customize fractional factorial designs.
- Expanded D-optimal capabilities—impose balance penalty, force categoric balance: This feature helps users equalize the number of treatments.
- Coordinate Exchange capability for D-optimal designs: Avoid the arbitrary nature of designs constructed from candidate point sets.
- In General or Factorial D-optimal designs, categorical factors can be specified as either nominal or ordinal (orthogonal polynomial contrasts): This affects the layout of analysis of variance (ANOVA).
- Specify the same amount for low and high in a mixture design: This is handy for keeping track of fixed component levels—these do not appear in the model.