Food Quali(yand Prefutnce Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.

Ill-l 18, 1997

0 1997 Else&r Science Ltd
Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved
ELSEVIER PII:SO950-3293(96)00026-2 0950-3293/97
817.00+.00

INCOMPLETEBLOCKDESIGNS
FORTHEMINIMISATIONOF
ORDERANDCARRY-OVEREFFECTSINSENSORYANALYSIS'
Roderick D. Ball*
NZ Forest Research Institute P.B. 3020, Roturua, New Zealand

(Received 25 Ju&y 1995; revised version received24 April 1996; accepted 11 May 1996)

In designing experiments for sensory analysis the

ABSTRACT following considerations are also important:

Panelists often can taste only a limited number of

Two important considerations for experimental designs for samples per session, therefore it is often necessary to
use incomplete block designs. In the context of this
sensory evaluation are order and carry-over effects. Ideally
paper a block is the set of samples tasted by a
each sample would be presented equally often in each order
panelist and the treatments are the different sam-
and would be preceded equally often by every other sample.
ples tasted.
Williams (1949) gives a number of designs which achieve
The score a panelist gives to a sample may be
this but only -for complete block designs. We describe influenced by which samples (if any) have been
methods for generating incomplete block designs which are tasted previously (carry-over effect). Therefore it is
approximate& balanced for carry-over effects. Using the important to have designs that are balanced or
cyclic structure of cyclic designs as in Davis and Hall ‘nearly balanced’ for carry-over effects. Designs
(1969), we obtain designs balanced for order ekcts and which achieve this are known variously as ‘change-
nearly balanced for carry-over e$cts. We describe a com- over designs’ or ‘cross-over designs’.
puter intensive discrete optimisation method which can be The score a panelist gives to a sample may be
used when a cyclic design is not possible. 0 I997 Elsevier influenced by the number of previous samples tas-
Science Ltd. All rights reserved ted by the panelist (order effect). Therefore it is
important to have designs that are balanced or
nearly balanced for order effects.

INTRODUCTION Order and carry-over effects have been found to be

important, though which is most important varies with
product and attribute. See for example Muir and Hunter
In sensory analysis a number of panelists are chosen to (1991).
taste a number of different samples (i.e. products or The carry-over effect of the immediately preceding
treatments). Panelists may be asked to rate each sample sample is known as a ‘first order carry-over effect’. We
according to various attributes such as sweetness or advocate the use of efficient incomplete block designs,
acidity and/or overall acceptability. nearly balanced for order and first order carry-over
In any experimental design the goal is to obtain the effects. By ‘nearly balanced’ we mean designs that are
maximum amount of information for a given experi- almost as good as balanced designs for practical pur-
mental effort, to obtain comparisons between treatments poses. For example, a design balanced for first order
which are approximately unbiased, and to control for carry-over effects would have the property that the
sources of random variability. Randomised block designs number of times a treatment immediately precedes any
are used to control for sources of random variability. other treatment as a constant. A design ‘nearly balanced’
More efficient estimates are obtained if experimental for first order carry-over effects would have the property
units sharing common values of one or more random that the number of times a treatment immediately pre-
factors are grouped together in blocks. If the number of‘ cedes any other treatment as a constant to within plus or
treatments is greater than the size of blocks then a design minus one.
is an ‘incomplete block design’. A design is ‘balanced’ if Note: We do not give a formal definition of ‘nearly
every treatment occurs together in a block equally often balanced’ here because although deviations from balance
with every other treatment. can be quantified mathematically (cf. our optimisation
criteria in sections on optimising cyclic design and
‘This work was supported by the New Zealand Foundation for
Research Science and Technology under contract C06432. optimising for order and carry-over), the exact amount
*ballr@fri.cri.nz of acceptable imbalance depends on the size of the

111
 112 R. D. Ball

experiment and the accuracy required. Users may wish this is ‘range bias’ where the carry-over effect of a
to estimate, from simulated data the amount of bias in previous strong tasting sample is less when followed
treatment differences which would result from various by another strong sample than when followed by a
scenarios involving possible carry-over effects. It does not weak sample.
make economic sense to expend substantial effort to There may be ‘nonlinearity of panelist response’.
reduce the bias to a level less than 0.14.2 times the By this we mean that equation (1) below, applies
standard error of the estimated difference between treat- withy+ replaced byf(y& for some unknown non-
ments. linear function f. This causes an effect similar to
The primary advantage of using ‘nearly balanced’ range bias (McBride, 1982) when the data are
designs over ‘balanced designs’ is flexibility. For any analysed assuming equation (1) applies. Nonlinearity
given design parameters (number of treatments v, size of of panelist response is almost inevitable if a fixed
blocks k, number of replicates r, and number of blocks b) line scale is used and scores vary widely over the
we can, with the methods of this paper, usually achieve scale. Differences at the ends may be compressed to
designs for which the number of times a treatment fit the scale.
immediately precedes any other treatment is one of two There may be missing values caused by panelists
adjacent whole numbers. For example, in the design of not showing up.
Table 1 each of 5 treatments is preceded twice by three
Any remaining bias could be corrected for by fitting a
treatments, and three times by one treatment. In the
terms for the order and carry-over effects, if carry-over
design of the section on product improvement, each of 18
effects are likely to be important.
treatments occurs 2 or 3 times in first position and is
The standard model is:
preceded twice by at most one treatment. In general, for
given v and k, the larger the design the closer we come to yjk = CL + bj + *k + ui(j,k)
+ h(J,k-1) + ejk
balance. For further discussion see Mead (1990).
= grand mean + panelist + order + treatment +
On the other hand, if we insist on using balanced
designs we are more restricted as to the size of the design. carry-over effect + error (1)
For example with 71~4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13 samples the
designs of Afsarinejdad (1983) and Wakeling and Mac- where the indices j, k correspond to block (i.e. panelist),
Fie (1995) require multiples of b = 12, 20, 42, 56, 72, and order within block, respectively and ;(j, k) denotes
110, 156 panelists. If v = 10 then k = 4, and multiples of the treatment applied at order k in block j. The first
b = 30 are required. See also Durier et al. (1992); MacFie order carry-over effect ti(j, k-l) is the expected differ-
et al. ( 1989); Schlich ( 1993) for a discussion of the use of ence in the response yjk(after correcting for order)
complete block change over designs for taste testing. caused by the previous treatment in the block.
These authors use Latin square designs or designs of Other models are possible, such as those allowing for
Williams ( 1949). different use of the scale by different panelists, e.g. Gay
The advantages of balanced designs are that in theory, and Mead (1992) who fit an additional multiplicative
treatment effects are unbiased by carry-over effects. The scaling factor for each panelist (see also Brockhoff and
designs mentioned in the previous paragraph have the Skovgaard (1994)); the carry-over effect could be a
additional advantage of being balanced for all orders of function of the value of other attributes; and responses
carry-over effects. However, even with balanced designs, and continuous covariates could be subjected to general
bias caused by carry-over effects can occur because: non-linear transformation methods such as ACE (Breiman
and Friedman, 1985), AVAS (Tibshirani, 1988; Hastie
l The actual carry-over effects may depend not only
and Tibshirani, 1990)) as in McMath et al. ( 1991). See
on the previous samples but also on the sample
also MacFie and Hedderley (1993). Alternatively, taste
being affected by the carry-over. An example of
responses could be evaluated in prior experiments with
controlled levels of compounds of interest and transfor-
TABLE 1. Number of Precedences ofTreatment 0 in Cyclically mations determined parametrically as in Curtis et al.
Generated Blocks (1984).
Permuted initial block Treatment If the standard model does not apply, or range bias
1 2 3 4 effects are substantial, then correcting for carry-over
effects using equation (1) may not be effective or may do
(0 1 2 3) 0 0 0 3
1 0’
more harm than good. Senn (1993) cautions against
(1 032) 2 0
(3 2 1 0) 3 0 0 0 correcting for carry-over effects in clinical trials for this
(0 2 1 3) 1 0 2 0 reason.
(023 1) 0 1 1 1 The choice of samples to use in an experiment should
(1 230) 0 0 1 2’ be the first line of defense (e.g. don’t choose samples
(4 1 2 0) 0 1 1 1*
Column total for chosen blocks 2
which lead to range bias), followed by good experimental
2 2 3
design, followed by allowing for carry-over effects in the
* indicates chosen blocks for optimal design analysis using an appropriate model.
 Minimisation of Order and Carry-over E$cts 113

Our strategy for design construction is to first generate (1983); MacFie et al. (1989) and Wakeling and MacFie
an efficient incomplete block design with each block (1995).
consisting of the samples tasted by one panelist in one
session, then to apply permutations to each of the blocks Computer generation of incomplete block designs
of the incomplete block design to obtain incomplete
block designs nearly balanced for order and carry-over If a cyclic design is possible an efficient initial cyclic
effects. In the section on optimising and testing Splus, we design can be generated by one of the programs of John
describe calculations in Splus (Becker et al., 1988). In the et al. (1993). If a cyclic design is not possible, alternatives
product improvement section we give an example of the are the dual of a cyclic design, which can be generated
methodology applied to a factorial design for product by the same program, or designs generated by using
improvement using response surface methodology. simulated annealing (Metropolis et al., 1953; Aarts and
Splus and C code for the methods described in this van Laarhoven, 1984) for optimisation. A program using
paper are available from the author on request. simulated annealing was written by D. Whitaker and B.
McElwee (formerly of the New Zealand DSIR Applied
Mathematics Division), and is described in Ball (1991).
These programs use the A-optimality criterion which
INCOMPLETE BLOCKDESIGNS
results in designs which minimise the average variance of
estimates of treatment differences. An alternative method
Efficient incomplete block designs can be found in tables is described in Nguyen and Dey ( 1990)) who use a more
or computer generated. Efficient designs that are nearly ‘greedy’ algorithm which needs to be run many times
balanced are just as good as balanced designs for prac- from different random starting designs.
tical purposes and present no problems for analysis. With several different initial blocks, cyclic designs with
The statistical analysis can be carried out using resi- efficiency close to the maximum possible can usually be
dual maximum likelihood (REML) (Patterson and obtained. By restricting to the class of cyclic designs we
Thompson, 1971; Verbyla, 1990). REML is a general- are optimising over a much smaller class of designs, but
isation of analysis of variance which can be used to ana- one which still contains many efficient designs. This leads
lyse unbalanced data giving results equivalent to Genstat to a fast computer generation of designs. Cyclic designs
ANOVA (Payne et al., 1993) for balanced data. The have further advantages for use in sensory analysis,
design is as good as balanced for practical purposes if the described below.
standard errors of differences between treatments (SEDs)
are similar enough so that the user is content to use the
maximum SED for all comparisons.
OPTIMISING FOR ORDER AND
An adaptation of the REML program (Robinson and
Digby, 1981) is now available in Genstat (Payne et al., CARRY-OVER EFFECTS
1993) and also in SAS, 1992 as PROC MIXED, though
we recommend Genstat because it prints correct SEDs
automatically. It is difficult to obtain correct SEDs in We obtain designs nearly balanced for order and carry-
SAS particularly when there are multiple sources of var- over effects by modifying incomplete block designs in
iation such as a split plot design. See Milliken and Johnson such a way that we obtain the desired properties without
(1984) for approaches to calculation of SEDs in SAS. affecting the efficiency.
An initial efficient incomplete block design is obtained
Tables of incomplete block designs using the programs or tables described above. The start-
ing designs will be modified by an algorithm which
If a computer is not available, suitable designs may be involves repeatedly permuting randomly chosen blocks.
found in tables, although use of the tables often necessi- The general approach of applying permutations to the
tates compromises in the experimental plan such as initial blocks of cyclic designs is due to Davis and Hall
changes to the treatment structure or number of pane- (1969). The method of section 3 (operating cyclic
lists. designs) applies this to designs for sensory analysis,
Tables of incomplete block designs are contained in adding an optimisation strategy and noting that the
Cochran and Cox (1957). Clatworthy (1973), which permutations preserve orthogonality of order effects.
includes designs constructed by Bose et al. (1954), gives The method of section 3.2 (optimising for order and
tables of two associate class partially balanced designs carry-over) is an alternative to the method of Eccleston
(PBIB/2), including cyclic designs. Their designs are and Street (1994), who start with the class of optimal
constructed by a number of methods. These designs can, row-column designs (rows and columns correspond
with skilled use of pseudo factors, be analysed using to two different sources of variation) and permute the
Genstat ANOVA. Tables of cyclic designs are contained rows.
in John et al. (1972). Tables of change-over designs are The main differences between our approach and
contained in Patterson and Lucas (1961); Afsarinejdad Eccleston and Street’s are:
114 R.D. Ball

1. we start with an incomplete block design rather treatment. Furthermore, because of the cyclic property
than a row-column design each treatment is automatically preceded equally often
2. we use an optimisation algorithm rather than enu- by the empty treatment, i.e. tasted first equally often.
merating permutations and For a given set of initial blocks optimisation can pro-
3. our optimisation explicitly recognises separate ceed by minimising the objective function
order and carry-over effects while theirs uses an
information matrix derived from a least squares c(D)= range(g) + stdev(s)
analysis which makes certain unstated assumptions
about the relative importance of panelist and order where S = {m;:15 i < v} and mi is the number of
to variation. times treatment 0 is preceded by treatment i in the
design D. c(D) measures the degree of deviation from
We use an incomplete block design rather than a row-
balance for first order carry-over effects with c(D) =O
column design because as discovered by Eccleston and
if and only if the D is balanced for first order carry-
Street, the row column design is not approximately
over effects.
balanced for carry-over, and more importantly we
If the design is small the best design can be chosen by
regard ‘panelist’ as the major source of variation, that is
evaluating c(D) for all possible permutations. Otherwise
to say two tastings by the same panelist are more closely
an optimisation strategy is needed.
correlated than two tastings by different panelists in the
The optimisation strategy is determined by two whole
same order. Furthermore, some sort of optimisation is
numbers nl, np. At each iteration of the optimisation,
needed to deal with designs of the size considered here.
random permutations are applied to a set of nl randomly
Optimising cyclic designs chosen initial blocks of the best design found so far.
Initially we use nl = 1, then try nl = 2 and nl =3 if a
If the starting design is a cyclic design, a fast algorithm is better design is required and no new best design is found
obtained by permuting the initial blocks of the cyclic in n2 = lO&lOOO iterations. Users may wish to experi-
design and expanding the permuted initial blocks cycli- ment with the numbers 721,122. The trade off is that if ni is
cally as described in Davis and Hall (1969). A cyclic small there may be no better design obtainable by per-
design (John, 1987) is determined by its initial blocks. If muting nl rows, while if ni is large we are applying major
there are v treatments represented by the numbers modifications at each step, hence the probability of find-
O,l,...,v - 1, then the full design is generated by repeat- ing a new best design is small if the current best design is
edly adding 1 to each element of the initial block and good.
reducing mod v. The process of cyclic development stops Note: The term range(s) in the objective function is
whenever the next block would have the same elements not strictly necessary, because this term will usually be
as the initial block. fixed at 0 or 1 if a design is nearly optimal, and thus have
For example the initial block (0 1 3) with v ~4 gen- no effect on the optimum. However we have found it
erates the design with blocks (0 1 3), (1 2 0), (2 3 I), (3 0 helps initially in the optimisation to move quickly away
2). Sometimes cyclically developing an initial block gives from designs where imbalance is concentrated in one or
rise to sets of blocks of size less than v, called partial sets. two treatments, e.g. if treatment 0 was preceded 5 times by
For example, developing (0 2 4) mod 6 gives only two treatment 1 and preceded once by every other treatment.
distinct blocks (0 2 4), ( 1 3 5), because further develop- The construction of cyclic designs with the desired
ment mod 6 gives (2 4 0), which has the same elements as properties is illustrated in Table 1. A basic design is given
the initial block. with 3 initial blocks (0 1 2 3), (0 1 2 3), (0 1 2 4), from a
Partial sets can be used to advantage in generating cyclic design with v = 5 treatments and b = 15 blocks,
designs with numbers of blocks not a multiple of v. and k = 4 samples per block. Note that it is intended that
For taste testing, cyclic designs have several further the initial block (0 1 2 3) occurs twice. Each row of the
advantages. Suppose we have an efficient cyclic design, left hand side of Table 1 consists of a permutation of one
with no partial sets. Because of the cyclic property every of the initial blocks (but not all possible permutations are
treatment already occurs equally often in each order. shown), while the corresponding row of the right hand
This is one of our desired properties. This will remain the side shows the number of times treatment 0 is preceded
case if we permute the initial blocks and re-generate the by each of the other treatments 1, 2, 3, 4, in the cyclic set
design cyclically. Since the efficiency of a design is not generated by expanding the permuted initial block. For
affected if individual blocks are re-ordered, we can retain example expanding ( 1 0 3 2) gives the cyclic set (1 0 3 2),
efficiency and order balance with any set of permutations (2 1 4 3), (3 2 0 4), (4 3 1 0), (0 4 2 1). We see that 0 is
of the initial blocks. By optimising over the set of per- preceded twice by 1 and once by 2 and zero times by 3
mutations we can usually achieve near balance for first and 4. This gives the entries 2, 1, 0, 0 on the right hand
order carry-over effects. To assess the number of times side of row 2. Expanding (0 2 3 1) gives the cyclic set (0 2
each treatment is preceded by each other treatment it is 3 l), (1 3 4 2), (2 4 0 3), (3 0 1 4), (4 1 2 0) in which 0 is
sufficient (by the cyclic property again) to consider the preceded once by 2, 3, 4 and zero times by 1. This gives
number of times treatment 0 is preceded by each other the entries 0, 1, 1, 1 on the right hand side of row 5.
 Minimisation of Order and Carry-over Effects 115

A design can be obtained by choosing 3 rows from the

table. The total number of precedences of treatment 0 for OPTIMISING AND TESTING IN
the design is obtained by summing the precedences over SPLUS
the chosen rows. The optimal design is given by choosing
the rows marked ‘*‘. The totals for the optimal design
are 2, 2, 2, 3, indicating that treatment 0 is preceded The optimisation of cyclic designs for order and carry-
twice by treatments 1, 2, 3 and 3 times by treatment 4. over effects is carried out using functions written in the
Splus language for data analysis and graphics (Becker et
Optimising for order and carry-over, general designs al., 1988), and for more general designs the optimisation
is written in C with an interface to Splus for ease of use.
The methods of this section can be applied to any design, The Splus code below shows the calculation of the
but require more computation than the method of the optimal design for the example of Table 1. The initial
previous section (optimising cyclic designs). blocks are read into a matrix and the optimisation done by
When a cyclic design is not possible, or when partial the function optimal. reorder. cyclic, which returns
sets are needed in the cyclic design a discrete optimisa- the optimally permuted initial blocks. These are then
tion involving permuting blocks of the full design is expanded to a full design.
necessary. For example, the design of the section on pro-
duct improvement has u = 18 treatments and b = 48 The Splus command
blocks. A cyclic design without partial sets is not possible
>des<-optimal.reorder.cyclic
because 48 is not a multiple of 18. As the permutations
(m,n=5,max.iter=lOO,nswaps=3)
used in this method do not preserve orthogonality of
order and treatment effects, an objective function must where m is a matrix of initial blocks gave the permuted
be formulated to choose a trade-off between the impor- initial blocks
tance of order and carry-over effects.
>des
The objective function to be minimised is a weighted
sum of mean squares of columns of matrices O[iJJ = Lll Ul L31 L41
number of times treatment i occurs in columnj and P[iJ] [IPI 1 0 3 2
= number of times treatment i is preceded by treatment [%I 1 2 3 0
j. If the mean squares are MSo,dcr and MScn,ry_ouc,then the [3?1 4 1 2 0
objective function is:
Expanding the permuted initial blocks gives the full
design, des. full. Each group of 5 rows of des. full is
obtained from a row of des by cyclic development as
described in an earlier section (optimising cyclic design).
Designs with small values of MS,,d,, are nearly
Rows 1 to5ofdes.fullareobtainedfromrow 1 ofdes,
balanced for order effects and designs with small values
and rows 6 to 10 (resp. 11 to 15) from row 2 (resp. 3).
of M&any-ovcr are nearly balanced for carry-over effects.
Each row of the full design consists of codes for the
Larger VaheS Of ze~,,,~_~~~ rehtive t0 w,,&, mean that
samples presented to a panelist in a single session.
carry-over effects are given a higher importance relative
Samples are presented in the order given.
to order effects.
The optimisation strategy is determined by three >des.full<-expand.cyclic(des,5)
whole numbers nl, n2, n3. At each iteration a certain
>des.full
number nl of random swaps is done on each of a number
n.2 of rows of the current best design. As a strategy to [,‘I ml L31
avoid being trapped at a local minimum these numbers [I>1 1 0 3
are increased if no improvement is obtained in a certain RI 2 4
number n3 of iterations, and reset to 1 if a new best [3,1 3 0
design (i.e. one for which the objective function has a [4,1 4
lower value) is found. [5,1 0 2
Users may wish to experiment with different values Fil 1 3
of nl&?~n3&rdcr~ Wcarry-oucr. We suggest initially setting [7J 2 4
nl = n2 = 1 and making n3 reasonably large but small [%I 3 0
compared to the maximum number of iterations con- [%I 4 1
templated. For testing the effect of different settings, PO,1 0 2
particularly of w,,~,w,~_,,~~, calculations demonstrated IIllJ 4 2
the next section will be useful. [12,1 0 3
The design in the final section was obtained using [13J 1 4
n, = n2 = 1, n3 = 100 and weightings r&,&r= 1 and wcnny_oucr P4J 2 0
= 30. U5J 3 1
116 R. D. Ball

The table plete block design which minimises bias due to order and
># precedences carry-over effects.
>table(des.full[,-5l,des.full[,-11) A cyclic design with initial blocks (0 3 6 9 12 15), (0 1
5 9 10 14), (0 1 2 3 13 15), (0 2 4 7 10 11) generated by
0 1 2 3 the cyclic designs program was used. The first two initial
0 0 3 2 2 blocks generated partial sets of 3 and 9 blocks. The 3rd
1 2 0 3 2 and 4th initial blocks generated full sets of 18 blocks so
2 2 2 0 3 that we obtain a total of 3 + 9 + 18 x2 = 48 blocks for the
3 2 2 2 0 48 panelists.
4 3 2 2 2 This basic design (an efficient incomplete block
design) was then optimised for order and carry-over
shows the number of times treatments are preceded by effects by the optimisation method described previously.
other treatments in the design. The entry in the ith row After 50,000 iterations a design was found in which each
and thejth column is the number of times treatment i treatment was preceded by every other treatment O,l, or
precedes treatmentj in the design. The diagonal entries 2 times, but only preceded twice by at most one treat-
are zero because no treatment occurs twice in a block, ment. The number of replicates of each treatment is 16
while the off diagonal elements are all 2 or 3, which is and each treatment occurs at least 2 times in first position
the best possible as changing the design to decrease one so that each treatment is preceded by at most 14 other
of the 3s will necessarily involve increasing one of the treatments. Therefore the best we could hope for is for
other elements giving another 3, or a 4. a design with 7 fewer 2s and 7 fewer OS in the table of
The table precedences (Table 2) and 3 fewer 4s and 3 fewer 2s in
># order the table for order (Table 3).
Xable(col(des.full),des.full) As in the optimising and testing Splus section, the
following tables show the precedence structure and
0 1 2 3 4 number of times each treatment occurs in each order for
1 3 3 3 3 3 the best design found.
2 3 3 3 3 3
3 3 3 3 3 3 TABLE 2. Table ofPrecedences for Product Improvement Design
4 3 3 3 3 3 ># precedences
>table~des48x6.full.opt~,-61,des48x6.full.opt~,-lI~

shows the number of times treatments occur in each 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

order of presentation. The entry in the ith row and 0020111101200011011
jth column is the number of times treatmentj occurs at 1101111111001101011
order of presentation i. These are all equal, as desired. 2110111110111111010
3111011101101110111
4010001110111111121
5111110201011111001
EXAMPLE FOR PRODUCT 6011111011111101100
7101111001111110201
IMPROVEMENT 8101111110011011101
9111111111011010101
10011110011101211010
110 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 11 0 1 1 1 1 1 1
In this section we give an example of the application of 12 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 2
the methods of the section optimising for order and 13101100111110101111
carry-over effects to a design for product improvement 14 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0
using response surface methodology (Box et al., 1978). 15 1 1 10 1 1 1 10 11 1 1 0 1 0 1 0
16 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1
The basic design was a three factor design with data
17111001011111110110
points corresponding to faces and corners of a unit cube,
with face points pushed out to the unit sphere and four
centre-points, giving a total of 8 edges +6 faces +4 TABLE 3. Table of order for product improvement design
centre-points. The 8 edges, 6 faces and 4 centre points ># order
>table(col(des48x6.full.opt),des48x6.full.opt)
corresponding to combinations of the three factors may
be randomly assigned to the 18 treatment codes O,l,..., 17 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
of the design below. 1 332233323322233333
Note: we do not make use of the factorial structure of 2 333422332323323223
the treatments, in constructing the design below. How to 3 323333332242322332
effectively do so is a topic of current research. 4 223343233323332322
5 233223233333233233
Six samples were presented to each of 48 panelists. As
6 332222323233333333
described above we wish to obtain an efficient incom-
 Minimisation of Order and Carry-over E$ects 117

Breiman, L. and Friedman, J. H. (1985) Estimating optimal

CONCLUSIONS transformations for multiple regression and correlation.
journal of the American Statistical Association 80, 58(r597.
Brockhoff and Skovgaard (1994) Modelling individual differ-
ences between assessors in sensory evaluations. Food Quality
We have described methods for construction of incom-
and Preference 5, 2 15-224.
plete block designs in sensory analysis where each block Clatworthy, W. H. (1973) Tables of two-associate-class par-
corresponds to a single panelist in a single session, suitable tially balanced designs, National Bureau of Standards,
for a range of sensory applications including using descrip- Applied Mathematics Series 63.
tive analysis and response surface analysis methodology. Cochran, W. G. and Cox, G. M. (1957) Experimental Designs.
The first method, adjusting cyclic designs by permut- Wiley.
ing initial blocks is computationally faster, and the com- Curtis, D. W., Stevens, D. A. and Lawless, H. T. (1984) Per-

putation can be carried out in Splus. The second method ceived intensity of the taste of sugar mixtures and acid
mixtures. Chemical Senses 9(2), 107-120.
is more general and applies when a cyclic design is not
Davis, A. W. and Hall, W. B. (1969) Cyclic change-over
possible or when partial sets are needed.
designs. Biometrika 56( 2)) 283-293.
The designs constructed using these methods have
Durier, C., Bruetschy, A. and Monod, H. (1992) Neighbour
nearly optimal efficiency for estimation of differences balanced factorial designs for wine-tasting sessions. Proceedings of
between treatments (typically efficiency in excess of 99% the International Biometrics Conference, Hamilton, N.Z., 93.
of the upper bound can be obtained) while minimising Eccleston, J. A. and Street, D. J. (1994) An algorithm for the
possible bias due to order and carry-over effects. construction of optimal or near optimal change-over designs.
It may still be important to include terms for range Australian Journal of Statistics 36(3), 37 l-378.
bias, carry-over, and order effects in statistical analysis. Gay, C. and Mead, R. (1992) A statistical appraisal of the
problem of sensory measurement. Journal of Sensory Studies 7,
205-228.
Hastie, T. J. and Tibshirani, R. J. (1990) Generalized Additive
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Models. Chapman and Hall.
John, J. A., Wolock, F. W., David, H. A., Cameron, J. M. and
Speckman, J. A. (1972) Cyclic Designs, NBS Applied
This work was supported by a the New Zealand Foun- Mathematics series 62.
dation for Research Science and Technology contract John, J. A. (1987) Cyclic Designs. Chapman and Hall.
C06432. I would like to thank Professor Nye John and John, J. A., Whitaker, D. and Triggs, C. M. (1993) Construc-

David Whitaker for introducing me to cyclic designs and tion of Cyclic Designs Using Integer Programming. Journal of
Statistical Planning and Inference 36, 357-366.
discussing their work on optimal designs, when we were
McBride, R. L. (1982) Range bias in sensory evaluation. Jour-
all members of the former DSIR Applied Mathematics
nal of Food Technology 17, 405-410.
Division; John Maindonald for many useful discussions;
MacFie, H. J. H., Bratchell, N., Greenhoff, K. and Vallis, L. V.
and Nihal De Silva, Nicola Richardson and Shona Designs to balance the effect of order and presentation and
Murray and the referees for useful suggestions for first order carry-over effects in Hall tests. journal of Sensory
improving this manuscript. Studies 4, 129-148.
MacFie, H. J. H. and Hedderley, D. (1993) Current practice in
relating sensory perception to instrumental measurements.
Food Quality and Preference 4, 4149.
REFERENCES McMath, K. L., Paterson, V. J., Young, H., McRae, E. A. and
Ball, R. D. (1991) Factors affecting the sensory perception of
sweetness and acidity in kiwifruit. Acta Horticulturae 297, 489-
Aarts, E. H. L. and van Laarhoven, P. J. M. (1984) Statistical 500.
cooling: A general approach to combinatorial optimization Mead, R. (1990) The non-orthogonal design of experiments.
problems. Phillips Journal of Research #(4), 193-226. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A 153 (2)) 15 l-20 1.
Afsarinejdad, K. (1983) Balanced repeated measurements Metropolis, N., Rosenbluth, A. W., Rosenbluth, M. N., Teller,
designs. Biometrika 70, 199-204. A. H. and Teller, E. (1953) Equation of state calculation by
Ball, R. D. (1991) DSIR Applied Mathematics Experimental fast computing machines. Journal of Chemical Physics U(6),
Design Computer Programs, DSIR Physical Sciences Report 1087-1091.
30. Milliken, G. A. and Johnson, D. E. (1984) Analysis of messy data.
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The Vol. 1, Van Nostrand.
New S Language, a Programming Environment for Data Analysis Muir, D. D. and Hunter, E. A. (1991) Sensory evaluation of
and Graphics. Wadsworth and Brooks/Cole. cheddar cheese: Order of tasting and carryover effects. Journal
Bose, R. C., Clatworthy, W. H. and Shrikande, S. S. (1954) of Food Qualip and Preference 3(2), 141-145.
Tables of partially balances designs with two associate Nguyen, N. K. and Dey, A. (1990) Computer aided construc-
classes, North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station tion of small (M-S)-optimal incomplete block designs. Aus-
Technical Bulletin No. 107. tralian Journal of Statistics 32( 3)) 399410.
Box, G. E. P., Hunter, W. G. and Hunter, J. S. (1978) Statistics Patterson, H. D. and Lucas, H. L. (1961) Change-over designs,
for Experimenters, an Introduction to Design, Data Analysis and North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station and USDA
Model Building. Wiley. Tech. Bull, 147.
118 R. D. Ball

Patterson, H. D. and Thompson, R. (1971) Recovery of inter-
block information when block sizes are unequal. Biometrika
58(3), 545-554.
Payne, R. W. et al. (1993) Genstat 5 release 3 reference manual.
Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Robinson, D. L. and Digby, P. G. N. (1981) Program REML,
estimation of variance components in non-orthogonal data
by residual maximum likelihood, AFRC Unit of Statistics,
Edinburgh.
SAS Institute Inc. (1992) SAS Technical Report P-229, SAS/
STAT software: Changes and Enhancements, Release 6.07,
Gary, NC, 620.
Schlich, P. (1993) Uses of change-over designs and repeated
measurements in sensory and consumer studies. j’ournal of
Food Qua& and Preference 4, 223-235.
Senn, S. (1993) Cross-over Trials in Clinical Research. Wiley.
Tibshirani, R. (1988) Estimating transformations for regression
via additivity and variance stabilization. Journal of the Amer-
ican Statistical Association 83(402), 394-405.
Verbyla, A. P. (1990) A conditional derivation of residual
maximum likelihood. Australian Journal of Statistics 32( 2), 227-
230.
Wakeling, I. N. and MacFie, H. J. H. (1995) Designing
consumer trials balanced for first and higher orders of
carry-over effect when only a subset of k samples from t
may be tested. Journal of Food Quality and Preference 6, 299-
308.
Williams, E. J. (1949) Experimental designs for the estimation
of residual effects of treatments. Australian Journal of Scientific
Research, Series A 2, 149-l 68.