Back تجربة عاملية Arabic Diseñu esperimental AST Vollständiger Versuchsplan German Diseño factorial Spanish آزمایش عاملی Persian Plan factoriel French Eksperimen faktorial ID Plan factorial experimental Romanian Полный факторный эксперимент Russian Факторијални нацрти Serbian
In statistics, a full factorial experiment is an experiment whose design consists of two or more factors, each with discrete possible values or "levels", and whose experimental units take on all possible combinations of these levels across all such factors. A full factorial design may also be called a fully crossed design. Such an experiment allows the investigator to study the effect of each factor on the response variable, as well as the effects of interactions between factors on the response variable.
For the vast majority of factorial experiments, each factor has only two levels. For example, with two factors each taking two levels, a factorial experiment would have four treatment combinations in total, and is usually called a 2×2 factorial design. In such a design, the interaction between the variables is often the most important. This applies even to scenarios where a main effect and an interaction are present.
If the number of combinations in a full factorial design is too high to be logistically feasible, a fractional factorial design may be done, in which some of the possible combinations (usually at least half) are omitted.
Other terms for "treatment combinations" are often used, such as runs (of an experiment), points (viewing the combinations as vertices of a graph, and cells (arising as intersections of rows and columns).