An Easy Construction of Generalized Neighbor Designs in Minimal Circular Blocks

Abstract

Neighbor designs are used in the experiments where neighbor effects may arise. Neighbor designs neutralize these effects and are, therefore, considered to be robust against neighbor effects. Minimal neighbor designs are always most economical among the neighbor designs and are, therefore, preferred by the experimenters. Method of cyclic shifts provides these designs in circular blocks only for odd v (number of treatments). For v even, minimal circular generalized neighbor designs in which only v 2 unordered pairs of distinct treatments do not appear as neighbors will be the better alternate to the minimal neighbor designs. In this article, such minimal generalized neighbor designs are constructed in circular blocks for v even.