The Use of a Canonical Form in the Construction of Locally Optimal Designs for Non-Linear Problems

SUMMARY Optimal experimental designs for non-linear problems depend on the values of the underlying unknown parameters in the model. For various reasons there is interest in providing explicit formulae for the optimal designs as a function of the unknown parameters. This paper shows that, for a certain class of generalized linear models, the problem can be reduced to a canonical form. This simplifies the underlying problem and designs are constructed for several contexts with a single variable using geometric and other arguments.