Construction of equidistant and weak equidistant supersaturated designs

Supersaturated designs (SSDs) have been highly valued in recent years for their ability of screening out important factors in the early stages of experiments. Recently, Liu and Lin (in Statist Sinica 19:197–211, 2009) proposed a method to construct optimal mixed-level SSDs from smaller multi-level SSDs and transposed orthogonal arrays (OAs). This paper extends their method to construct more equidistant optimal SSDs by replacing the multi-level SSDs and transposed OAs with mixed-level SSDs and general transposed difference matrices, respectively, and then proposes two practical methods for constructing weak equidistant SSDs based on this extended method. A large number of new optimal SSDs can be constructed from these three methods. Some examples are provided and more new designs are listed in “Appendix” for practical use.