It would be nice to have an option for adding fillers when designing a trial. For example, if the number of Test + Check entries is 10 and there are three reps arranged in a spatial grid of 3 rows by 12 columns then there need to be 6 fillers. Sometimes it is desirable to have the fillers split across blocks. In the above example, 2 fillers would be allocated to each block. In order to do this it seems like an option to specify number of columns would need to be added and one extra optional data field, size of block, would also be needed in the design information. Default would be to stick all the fillers at the end, but if the user specifies the size of block then the fillers would be used to fill in on a block-by-block basis. Technically, the fillers are not experimental units of interest, but they need to be there to provide uniform competition and their phenotypic data is used in spatial analysis for the field.
lukasmueller
commented
2 years ago
It would be nice to have an option for adding fillers when designing a trial. For example, if the number of Test + Check entries is 10 and there are three reps arranged in a spatial grid of 3 rows by 12 columns then there need to be 6 fillers. Sometimes it is desirable to have the fillers split across blocks. In the above example, 2 fillers would be allocated to each block. In order to do this it seems like an option to specify number of columns would need to be added and one extra optional data field, size of block, would also be needed in the design information. Default would be to stick all the fillers at the end, but if the user specifies the size of block then the fillers would be used to fill in on a block-by-block basis. Technically, the fillers are not experimental units of interest, but they need to be there to provide uniform competition and their phenotypic data is used in spatial analysis for the field.