Wei Liu

Department of Statistics

University of Central Florida


Multiple Comparison For Successive Means

Suppose that the k treatments under comparison are ordered in a certain way. For example, they may be a sequence of increasing dose levels of a drug. It is interesting to look directly at the successive differences between the treatment effects mu_i , namely the set of differences mu_2 -mu_1,mu_3-mu_2. . . ,mu_k - mu_k-1. In particular, directional inferences on whether mu_i < mu_i+1 or mu_i > mu_i+1 for i=1,2,. . .,k-1 are useful. Lee and Spurrier (1995) present a one-sided and a two-sided confidence interval procedures for making successive comparisons between treatments. In this paper we develop a new procedure which is sharper than both the one-sided and two-sided procedures of Lee and Spurrier in terms of directional inferences. This new procedure is able to make more directional inferences than the two-sided procedure and maintains the inferential sensitivity of the one-sided procedure. The critical point of the new procedure is the same as that of Lee and Spurrier's one-sided procedure. We also propose a power function for the new procedure and determine the sample size necessary for a guaranteed power level. The application of the procedure is illustrated with an example.)


Back to Colloquium Series