Sliced space-filling designs

Abstract

We propose an approach to constructing a new type of design, a sliced space-filling design, intended for computer experiments with qualitative and quantitative factors. The approach starts with constructing a Latin hypercube design based on a special orthogonal array for the quantitative factors and then partitions the design into groups corresponding to different level combinations of the qualitative factors. The points in each group have good space-filling properties. Some illustrative examples are given.