D-Optimal Designs for Ordinal Response Experiments

Ordinal response data are quite common in scientific experiments, and finding the optimal design for them is a challenging task.Adjacent-category models are widely used to model ordinal response data.In this paper, we study the D-optimal designs of adjacent-categories models with general link functions concerning both quantitative and qualitative factors.Some structure characteristics, including the number of support points and a simple complete class of the locally D-optimal design, are derived.Utilizing the obtained structure characteristics, an efficient algorithm is proposed to search out corresponding D-optimal designs.The integer-valued allocations for the corresponding D-optimal design are further discussed for practical implementation.Numerical examples show the advantages of the proposed design in both statistical efficiency and computational time.