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Anova and unbalanced designs

Dear Tal,

A complete explanation of this issue is too long for an email; I do address
it in my Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models text. The
question seems to come up so frequently that Georges Monette and I are
writing a paper on it (and related issues) for the upcoming useR conference.

Briefly, any set of "contrasts" that are orthogonal in the row basis of the
model matrix (essentially, composed from what you see when you use the
contrasts() function in R) will produce the same sums of squares (or, in the
multivariate case, sums of squares and products). This include Hermert
(contr.helmert), sigma-constrained (contr.sum), and orthogonal-polynomial
(contr.poly) contrasts, but not dummy-coded "contrasts" (contr.treatment).
(Actually, if you look carefully, you'll see that the contrasts defined for
treatment in the OBrienKaiser data are custom orthogonal contrasts similar
to Helmert contrasts.) Consequently, if all you're concerned with is the
ANOVA table, it doesn't matter which of these you use. If, however, you're
interested in the individual contrasts, it does of course matter which you
use, and in particular the orthogonal polynomial contrasts are not sensible
if the levels of the factor aren't ordered.

Regards,
 John

------------------------------
John Fox, Professor
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox
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