Tactic: Budget-Constrained Design

Tactic: Budget-Constrained Design

Orchestration Pattern

1. Assess Budget → Determine available GPU-hours, wall-clock time, and cost ceiling
2. factor-identification → Identify all candidate factors
3. Estimate Cost Per Run → Calculate time/compute for a single experiment run
4. Compute Maximum Runs → budget / cost_per_run = max feasible runs
5. level-specification → Constrain levels to fit within run budget
6. Select Design Type → Choose most information-efficient design for the budget
7. design-matrix-construction → Build the constrained design matrix

Decision Criteria

Optimization Strategies

• Sequential Design: Run screening first, then detailed study on important factors
• Adaptive Allocation: Allocate more runs to high-variance conditions
• Early Stopping: Define stopping criteria for clearly dominated configurations
• Transfer from Pilot: Use pilot study results to inform main study design
• Shared Controls: Reuse control/baseline runs across multiple comparisons

Quality Checks

• Does the design have sufficient power for the primary hypothesis?
• Are the most important factors given priority in the allocation?
• Is there a contingency plan if budget is cut mid-experiment?
• Are early stopping criteria pre-defined (not post-hoc)?
• Is the design balanced despite budget constraints?