 Saturation of an unreplicated two-factor regression

A two-way analysis of variance with the full interaction and one observation in each observed factor cell has one independently varying fitted cell mean per observation. A cell-indicator design matrix has full row matrix rank, even when some combinations are missing, so the model is a saturated statistical model. Its residual sum of squares is zero and its residual degrees of freedom are zero. Missing combinations make some coefficients nonidentifiable; they do not restore a pure-error estimate. Standard errors and an ordinary residual-based F-test for interactions therefore cannot be recovered merely by fitting this larger model.