Construction of minimal-point mixed-level screening designs using conference matrices

Screening designs are frequently used to identify active effects from a large number of factors. Small size designs are preferred when the experiments are costly. Two-level or three-level minimal-point screening designs have been well studied in the literature. However, minimal-point mixed-level designs have not been thoroughly explored. In this paper, a new class of minimal-point mixed-level designs is constructed using conference matrices. The constructed designs can be used to estimate the main effects and quadratic effects with a good performance of D-efficiency and variance of estimates.