Slicing Example

As an example let’s look at a contour plot for 4 process factors: Time, Temperature, Pressure, and Speed. After we assign Time to the horizontal axis and Pressure to the vertical axis, we then specify levels for Temperature and Speed. If we choose 3 temperature levels (slices) and 5 speed levels (slices), STRATEGY will generate 15 (3*5) contour plots for each of our responses.

The number of contour plots increases rapidly as you make more slices. It is usually best to start with a few plots to get the big picture and then select regions of special interest for a closer view with subsequent slices.

Keep in mind that additional slices between the ones you are looking at can sometimes show much better predictions especially when the factor (component) being sliced has large quadratic (and higher order) b’s.