A two-stage experimental design for dilution assays.

ABSTRACT: Dilution assays to determine solute concentration have found wide use in biomedical research. Many dilution assays return imprecise concentration estimates because they are only done to orders of magnitude. Previous statistical work has focused on how to design efficient experiments that can return more precise estimates, however this work has not considered the practical difficulties of implementing these designs in the laboratory. We developed a two-stage experiment with a first stage that obtains an order of magnitude estimate and a second stage that concentrates effort on the most informative dilution to increase estimator precision. We show using simulations and an empirical example that the best two-stage experimental designs yield estimates that are remarkably more accurate than sta

SUBMITTER: Ferguson JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7199778 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature