To detect panellists that are possible outliers, highlighting those with extremely high or low values.

Data Format

1. See the profiling dataset.

Options

1. Type of Panel Mean: Adjusted or Arithmetic. Arithmetic means are the well known means, calculated by summing the observations then dividing by the number of observations. Adjusted means, commonly called Least-Squares means (LSmeans) or Estimated Marginal Means (EMMs), use a regression model to calculate the means adjusting for the balance of the data.
   
2. Number of standard deviations: Assessors whose mean falls outside plus or minus this number of standard deviations from the panel mean are highlighted as possible outliers.
   
3. Y-axis Scale: Automatic or Manual. Automatic chooses the plotting range from the range of each attribute. Manual uses the plotting range you specified.
   
4. Y-axis min value: The smallest value that will appear on all plots when specifying the plotting range manually.
   
5. Y-axis max value: The largest value that will appear on all plots when specifying the plotting range manually.
   
6. Anonymise Assessors? Choose to replace the assessor names or not. There are options for randomly generated names or names from the assessor metadata.
   
7. Anonymise Products? Choose to replace the product names or not. There are options for randomly generated names or names from the product metadata.
   
8. Anonymise Attributes? Choose to replace the attribute names or not. There are options for randomly generated names or names from the attribute metadata.

Results and Interpretation

1. For each product and attribute a bar plot of panellist means is displayed. These plots overlay the panel mean as a black line and the chosen number of standard deviations from this mean as two dotted lines. Any panellist outside this range is highlighted as a possible outlier.
   
2. If “Type of Panel Mean” was set to “Adjusted” then the panel means will be adjusted means from models of the form: Attribute = Product + Assessor + Replicate + Residuals or Attribute = Product + Assessor + Residuals if replications are not present.
   
3. Outliers should not necessarily be removed.
   
4. ​For a large number of draws from a normal distribution it is expected that around 5% of observations would be outside of plus or minus 1.96 standard deviations from the mean.

Technical Information

1. R packages: This analysis uses SensoMineR to calculate the adjusted means.