Estimation of dispersion effects from robust design experiments with censored response data

A method is presented for estimating dispersion effects (DE) from robust design experiments (RDE) with control and noise factors involving censored response data. This method is developed to discern the significance of DE from RDE and the method aims at analyzing a multi‐level/multi‐factor experiment. This method imputes censored data by a regression based imputation technique, assuming that the distribution of lifetime before and after censoring is identical. This method also models the residuals to identify important DE, assuming that the distribution of the observed random variables of the model is the same with or without censored response data. Finally, the method is demonstrated through a numerical example. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.