Experimental Design - Computational Problems
There are basically two general issues to which Experimental Design is addressed:
With regard to the first question, there are different considerations that enter into the different types of designs, and they will be discussed shortly. In the most general terms, the goal is always to allow the experimenter to evaluate in an unbiased (or least biased) way, the consequences of changing the settings of a particular factor, that is, regardless of how other factors were set. In more technical terms, you attempt to generate designs where main effects are unconfounded among themselves, and in some cases, even unconfounded with the interaction of factors. With regard to the second question (how to analyze results of experiments), Statistica produces numerous spreadsheets with many specific options (e.g., allowing the user to "toggle" interactions into and out of the analysis) and a wide variety of plots to aid in the interpretation of results.