Introduction Caesarean section is one of the most commonly performed operations worldwide. A variety of surgical techniques for all elements of the operation are used. Many of them have not been rigorously evaluated in randomised controlled trials. The CORONIS Trial set out to simultaneously examine five elements of the caesarean section operation in seven lowto middle-income countries, using a...

Fractional factorial designs are widely used in practice and typically chosen according to the minimum aberration criterion. A sequential algorithm is developed for constructing efficient fractional factorial designs. A construction procedure is proposed that only allows a design to be constructed from its minimum aberration projection in the sequential build-up process. To efficiently identify...

Data screening is an indispensable phase in initiating the scientific discovery process. Fractional factorial designs offer quick and economical options for engineering highly-dense structured datasets. Maximum information content is harvested when a selected fractional factorial scheme is driven to saturation while data gathering is suppressed to no replication. A novel multi-factorial profile...

The generalized wordlength pattern (GWLP) introduced by Xu and Wu (2001) for an arbitrary fractional factorial design allows one to extend the use of the minimum aberration criterion to such designs. Ai and Zhang (2004) defined the J-characteristics of a design and showed that they uniquely determine the design. While both the GWLP and the J-characteristics require indexing the levels of each f...

In this paper, we describe the use of advanced statistical design in the screening experiment to configure parameters and operators of genetic algorithm (GA), which applied to find a shortest distance in a classical travelling salesman problem (TSP). Due to the number of GA parameters, operators and its levels considered in the experiment, the total numbers of program executions required by the...