Design and analysis of spit plot experiments

Split plot design

Design and fieldbook template

In a field experiment to test for effects of fungicide on crop, treatment of fungicides may be distinguised into multiple factors – based on chemical constituent, based on formulation, based on the mode of spray, etc. In a general case scenario where two former factors could be controlled, factor combinations may be organized in several different ways. When fully crossed implementation is not possible, split plot design comes to the rescue.

Dealing with factors

A factor is an headache

I have a dataset, cleaning which has been a pain lately. I’m going to use 20 observations of the imported dataset in this post to demonstrate how pathetically have I been advancing with it.

plot	jan_23_2017	jan_26_2017	jan_29_2017	feb_02_2017
1	0	0	b	am
2	f	s	1p	10p
3	b	a	sm	3p
4	b	b	ap	2
5	0	b	bp	s
6	b	a	sp	3

Providing it a context, the columns represent multiple observations of same variable at different dates, as apparent from the column names.