Between-individual variation, replication, and sampling (cont'd)

Assigning treatments to subjects (one possibility):

1. List all \( n \) subjects, one per row, in a spreadsheet.
2. Use the computer to give each subject a random number.
3. Assign treatment A or B to those subjects receiving the lowest or highest numbers, respectively.

Remember, randomization is important in all processes of the experiment, including preparation, setup, and measurement.

Randomize measurement of replicates in time:

• Watching 50 hours of great tit courtship behaviour on video increases your ability to observe
• After 10 hours of counting through a microscope, tiredeness kicks in
• Aging equipment

This shows time of measurement could be a confounding factor.

Birdsongs and attractiveness

Question: How do we measure relationship between male birdsongs and attractiveness to females?

Experimental Design: Record the complex song of one male and the simple song of another male, and then play these same two songs to each of 40 different females. Compute a confidence interval for the mean attractiveness of the two male songs.

Discuss: What is wrong with this design so far?

Answer: Each measure of female choice is a pseudoreplicate (\( n=40 \)).

Discuss: What is wrong with this design so far?

Answer: Each measure of female choice is a pseudoreplicate (\( n=40 \)).

Discuss: What can we do to correct for this pseudoreplication?

Answer: Record songs of 40 males with complex songs, and 40 separate males with simple songs. Each female should listen to a unique pair of songs, one simple and one complex. Design can get even more complicated than this.

Discuss: What are examples of confounding variables in the pseudoreplicated case?

Blood sugar levels

Experimental Design: Phlebotomist takes 15 samples from each of 10 patients, yielding a total of 150 measurements.

Discuss: What is the replicate and sample size in this situation? Why?

Antibiotics and bacterial growth rates

Experimental Design: Two agar plates: one with antibiotic, one without. Spread bacteria on both plates, let them grow for 24 hours, then measure diameter of 100 colonies on each plate?

Discuss: What is the replicate and sample size in this situation? Why?

Three things:

• Plan for precision (estimation)
• Plan for power (hypothesis testing)
• Plan for data loss

We'll use a two-sample \( t \)-test as the example in this section.

We would like to compute a 95% confidence interval for \( \mu_{1}-\mu_{2} \).

\[ \bar{Y}_{1}-\bar{Y}_{2} \pm \mathrm{margin \ of \ error}, \]

where “margin of error” is the half-width of the 95% confidence interval.

In this case, the following formula is an approximation to the number of samples needed to achieve the desired margin of error (assuming balanced design, i.e. \( n_{1}=n_{2}=n \)):

\[ n \approx 8\left(\frac{\mathrm{margin \ of \ error}}{\sigma}\right)^{-2} \]

Two-sample \( t \)-test:

\[ H_{0}: \mu_{1} - \mu_{2} = 0. \] \[ H_{A}: \mu_{1} - \mu_{2} \neq 0. \]

A conventional power to aim for is 0.80, i.e. we aim to prove \( H_{0} \) is false in 80% of experiments.

Assuming a significance level of 0.05, a quick approximation to the planned sample size \( n \) in each of two groups is

\[ n \approx 16\left(\frac{D}{\sigma}\right)^{-2}, \]

where \( D = |\mu_{1}-\mu_{2}| \) is the effect size.

library(pwr)

Two-sample \( t \)-test with significance level 0.05, 80% power, and relative effect size \( d = \frac{|\mu_{1}-\mu_{2}|}{\sigma} = 0.3 \).

pwr.t.test(d=0.3, power=0.8, type="two.sample")

     Two-sample t test power calculation 

              n = 175.3847
              d = 0.3
      sig.level = 0.05
          power = 0.8
    alternative = two.sided

NOTE: n is number in *each* group

• Whitlock & Schluter, Interleaf 2: Pseudoreplication (pp. 115-116)
• Whitlock & Schluter, Chapter 14: Designing experiments