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Using graphs to find the best block designs

A statistician designing an experiment wants to get as much information as possible from the data gathered. Often this means the most precise estimate possible (that is, an estimate with minimum possible variance) of the unknown parameters. If there are several parameters, this can be interpreted in many ways: do we want to minimize the average variance, or the maximum variance, or the volume of a confidence region for the parameters? In the case of block designs, these optimality criteria can be calculated from the concurrence graph of the design, and in many cases from its Laplacian eigenvalues. The Levi graph can also be used. The various criteria turn out to be closely connected with other properties of the graph as a network, such as number of spanning trees, isoperimetric number, and the sum of the resistances between pairs of vertices when the graph is regarded as an electrical network. In this chapter, we discuss the notions of optimality for incomplete-block designs, explain the graph-theoretic connections, and prove some old and new results about optimality.