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Randomized block experiments with multiple replicates

Unlike many experimental situations, with computer modelling the problem tends to be an embarrassment of riches. There is no problem with amount of data. You can gather scads and scads of data. So much so that it can be hard to find statistical tests that deal with what you’ve got. Right now, I have data that can be set up and analysed as a randomized block (or repeated measures) experiment. Here is an excellent description of randomized block ANOVA and how it works. The problem is, I not only have randomized blocks, I have multiple replicates within each block. Psychologists should be so lucky, right? But no one seems to cover this case, because usually people are lucky to get enough subjects to do a randomized block experiment with a single value in each treatment of each block. So, what to do now? I could take the average of the values and test those, or I could randomly pick one of my replicates to compare. Both seem plausible. But what is the ‘officially right’ thing to do? That’s my dilemma.

posted at 11:34 on Mon, 23 Jun, 2008 | path: /school



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