e/Blocking (statistics)

Information
has gloss	eng: In the statistical theory of the design of experiments, blocking is the arranging of experimental units in groups (blocks) that are similar to one another. For example, an experiment is designed to test a new drug on patients. There are two levels of the treatment, drug, and placebo, administered to male and female patients in a double blind trial. The sex of the patient is a blocking factor accounting for treatment variability between males and females. This reduces sources of variability and thus leads to greater precision.
lexicalization	eng: blocking
instance of	(noun) a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection and interpretation of quantitative data and the use of probability theory to estimate population parameters statistics