Discovering Causal Structure

The intended audience for this book, as stated by the author, is "industrial practitioners (managers, engineers, and scientists) involved in product or process experimentation and development" (p. xi). The author notes the scarcity of information for nonstatisticians on Taguchi methods and states that the book should be "useful to the statistically inexperienced engineer who would have some difficulty understanding and utilizing a traditional text concerning designed experiments" (p. xii). Most readers of Technometrics do not fit this last description, so this review will be oriented to those with statistical experience who may wish to consider recommending Taguchi literature to statistically inexperienced colleagues. The scope of the book is limited to basic "cookbook" applications involving product design and process development (offline quality control) as opposed to process monitoring (on-line quality control), as presented by Taguchi. There are eight chapters and seven appendixes, as follows: 1. The Economics of Variation 2. Introduction to the Analysis of Variance 3. Introduction to Orthogonal Arrays 4. Multiple Level Experiments 5. Interpretation of Experimental Results 6. Special Designs 7. Attribute Data