The Use of Treatment Concurrences to Assess Robustness of Binary Block Designs Against the Loss of Whole Blocks

摘要

© 2015 Australian Statistical Publishing Association Inc. Criteria are proposed for assessing the robustness of a binary block design against the loss of whole blocks, based on summing entries of selected upper non-principal sections of the concurrence matrix. These criteria improve on the minimal concurrence concept that has been used previously and provide new conditions for measuring the robustness status of a design. The robustness properties of two-associate partially balanced designs are considered and it is shown that two categories of group divisible designs are maximally robust. These results expand a classic result in the literature, obtained by Ghosh, which established maximal robustness for the class of balanced block designs.