CS5014: Homework 6

Due Friday, 6 October

Please turn in a hardcopy of the solution to this homework, written using LaTeX. You may not receive full credit if you do not staple together the pages of your homework. n

  • Consider the "User Interface Design Study" in course notes page "Some Uses of Experiments in Computer Science". Suppose that the user interface for a particular software application is being studied, and that the response variable is the time required to complete a set of tasks using the application.

    1. Comment on the suitability of each of the following experiment designs for the study: simple, full factorial, or fractional factorial.

    2. How many experiments would be required for a simple design, a full factorial design, and a fractional factorial design that was a half-replicate? (For the fractional factorial design that was a half-replicate, you should assume that the "user experience" factor has two levels.)

  • Do problem 17.1 in Jain. Show your work, possibly by attaching a copy of a spreadsheet, including its formulas. For part (a), construct a sign table and derive the nonlinear regression model expressing MIPS rating y in terms of x_A, x_B, and x_C.

    If you use a spreadsheet to solve problem 2 on the homework, you can just attach the spreadsheet with formulas to your solution. If you work the problem by hand, use LaTeX to generate the table in your solution.

  • For each of the four experiments in Table 1 of the WWW4 paper by Abrams, Standridge, Abdulla, Williams, Fox, ("Caching Proxies: Limitations and Potentials"), state the name of the experiment design that was used (i.e., "Experiment 1 is a 3**4*3 full factorial design with replications.").