Generalization of Staggered Nested Designs for Precision Experiments

Staggered nested designs are the most popular class of unbalanced nested designs in practical fields. The most important features of the staggered nested design are that it has a very simple open-ended structure and each sum of squares in the analysis of variance has almost the same degrees of freedom. Based on the features, a class of unbalanced nested designs which is generalized of the staggered nested design is proposed. Some of the generalized staggered nested designs are shown to be more efficient than the staggered nested design in estimating some of variance components and their linear combinations.