An overview of group factor screening

Abstract

The idea of using a group screening procedure to identify the important or active factors using a small designed experiment was described by Watson (1961) and is now applied in a variety of areas of science and engineering. Watson's work built on the earlier ideas of Dorfman (1943) for screening pooled samples of blood in order to identify diseased individuals using minimal resources. Generalizations and extensions of Watson's technique have been developed by a number of authors who have relaxed some of the stringent assumptions of the original work to make the methods more widely applicable to real problems. An overview of some of the proposed screening strategies is presented, including the use of several stages of experimentation, the reuse of runs from earlier stages, and screening techniques for detecting important main effects and interactions © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.