English

Empirical Bayes Multistage Testing for Large-Scale Experiments

Methodology 2022-09-14 v1

Abstract

Modern application of A/B tests is challenging due to its large scale in various dimensions, which demands flexibility to deal with multiple testing sequentially. The state-of-the-art practice first reduces the observed data stream to always-valid p-values, and then chooses a cut-off as in conventional multiple testing schemes. Here we propose an alternative method called AMSET (adaptive multistage empirical Bayes test) by incorporating historical data in decision-making to achieve efficiency gains while retaining marginal false discovery rate (mFDR) control that is immune to peeking. We also show that a fully data-driven estimation in AMSET performs robustly to various simulation and real data settings at a large mobile app social network company.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.05788,
  title  = {Empirical Bayes Multistage Testing for Large-Scale Experiments},
  author = {Hui Xu and Weinan Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.05788},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:11:26.949Z