HOMEWORK 9 – SAMPLE SOLUTIONS
IMPORTANT NOTE
These homework solutions show multiple approaches and some optional extensions for most of the
questions in the assignment. You don’t need to submit all this in your assign
...
HOMEWORK 9 – SAMPLE SOLUTIONS
IMPORTANT NOTE
These homework solutions show multiple approaches and some optional extensions for most of the
questions in the assignment. You don’t need to submit all this in your assignments; they’re included here
just to help you learn more – because remember, the main goal of the homework assignments, and of
the entire course, is to help you learn as much as you can, and develop your analytics skills as much as
possible!
Question 12.1
Describe a situation or problem from your job, everyday life, current events, etc., for which a design of
experiments approach would be appropriate.
Here’s one possible situation. Restaurants (the high-level expensive ones I don’t often go to) often
prefer the same sort of simplicity as we sometimes do in modeling: they prefer to have a small number
of items on the menu. So, a restauranteur needs to decide what combinations of entrees, side dishes,
etc. to put on the menu. Of course, there are too many combinations to try them all, so a design-ofexperiments approach could help the restauranteur collect some data and make informed menu
decisions.
Question 12.2
To determine the value of 10 different yes/no features to the market value of a house (large yard, solar
roof, etc.), a real estate agent plans to survey 50 potential buyers, showing a fictitious house with
different combinations of features. To reduce the survey size, the agent wants to show just 16 fictitious
houses. Use R’s FrF2 function (in the FrF2 package) to find a fractional factorial design for this
experiment: what set of features should each of the 16 fictitious houses have? Note: the output of FrF2
is “1” (include) or “-1” (don’t include) for each feature.
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