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Related papers: A Decision Theoretic Approach to A/B Testing

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In this paper, we draw attention to a problem that is often overlooked or ignored by companies practicing hypothesis testing (A/B testing) in online environments. We show that conducting experiments on limited inventory that is shared…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-06-11 Dennis Bohle , Alexander Marynych , Matthias Meiners

Randomized controlled experiments assess new policy impacts on performance metrics to inform launch decisions. Traditional approaches evaluate metrics independently despite correlations, and mixed results (e.g., positive revenue impact,…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-29 Hoiyi Ng , Guido Imbens

A/B testing has become the cornerstone of decision-making in online markets, guiding how platforms launch new features, optimize pricing strategies, and improve user experience. In practice, we typically employ the pairwise $t$-test to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Junpeng Gong , Chunkai Wang , Hao Li , Jinyong Ma , Haoxuan Li , Xu He

A/B testing refers to the task of determining the best option among two alternatives that yield random outcomes. We provide distribution-dependent lower bounds for the performance of A/B testing that improve over the results currently…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-02-25 Emilie Kaufmann , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

Active learning is usually applied to acquire labels of informative data points in supervised learning, to maximize accuracy in a sample-efficient way. However, maximizing the accuracy is not the end goal when the results are used for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-22 Louis Filstroff , Iiris Sundin , Petrus Mikkola , Aleksei Tiulpin , Juuso Kylmäoja , Samuel Kaski

In many real-world scenarios where data is high dimensional, test time acquisition of features is a non-trivial task due to costs associated with feature acquisition and evaluating feature value. The need for highly confident models with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Orpaz Goldstein , Mohammad Kachuee , Kimmo Karkkainen , Majid Sarrafzadeh

A/B testing refers to the statistical procedure of conducting an experiment to compare two treatments, A and B, applied to different testing subjects. It is widely used by technology companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Netflix, to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Victoria Pokhiko , Qiong Zhang , Lulu Kang , D'arcy P. Mays

Statistical protocols are often used for decision-making involving multiple parties, each with their own incentives, private information, and ability to influence the distributional properties of the data. We study a game-theoretic version…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-24 Flora C. Shi , Stephen Bates , Martin J. Wainwright

On-line experimentation (also known as A/B testing) has become an integral part of software development. To timely incorporate user feedback and continuously improve products, many software companies have adopted the culture of agile…

Applications · Statistics 2019-08-13 Yu Wang , Somit Gupta , Jiannan Lu , Ali Mahmoudzadeh , Sophia Liu

Aleatoric and Epistemic uncertainty have achieved recent attention in the literature as different sources from which uncertainty can emerge in stochastic modeling. Epistemic being intrinsic or model based notions of uncertainty, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-15 Ryan Warnick

A/B test, a simple type of controlled experiment, refers to the statistical procedure of experimenting to compare two treatments applied to test subjects. For example, many IT companies frequently conduct A/B tests on their users who are…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Qiong Zhang , Lulu Kang

Online experiments in internet systems, also known as A/B tests, are used for a wide range of system tuning problems, such as optimizing recommender system ranking policies and learning adaptive streaming controllers. Decision-makers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Qing Feng , Samuel Daulton , Benjamin Letham , Maximilian Balandat , Eytan Bakshy

Modern data analysis frequently involves large-scale hypothesis testing, which naturally gives rise to the problem of maintaining control of a suitable type I error rate, such as the false discovery rate (FDR). In many biomedical and…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-25 David S. Robertson , James M. S. Wason , Aaditya Ramdas

The widespread adoption of online randomized controlled experiments (A/B Tests) for decision-making has created ongoing capacity constraints which necessitate interim analyses. As a consequence, platform users are increasingly motivated to…

Applications · Statistics 2025-11-11 Abbas Zaidi , Rina Friedberg , Samir Khan , Yao-Yang Leow , Maulik Soneji , Houssam Nassif , Richard Mudd

In industry, online randomized controlled experiment (a.k.a. A/B experiment) is a standard approach to measure the impact of a causal change. These experiments have small treatment effect to reduce the potential blast radius. As a result,…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-29 Tanmoy Das , Dohyeon Lee , Arnab Sinha

Technology firms conduct randomized controlled experiments ("A/B tests") to learn which actions to take to improve business outcomes. In firms with mature experimentation platforms, experimentation programs can consist of many thousands of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-30 Winston Chou , Colin Gray , Nathan Kallus , Aurélien Bibaut , Simon Ejdemyr

Bayesian model selection provides a formal method of determining the level of support for new parameters in a model. However, if there is not a specific enough underlying physical motivation for the new parameters it can be hard to assign…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Christopher Gordon , Roberto Trotta

A Bayesian network is a widely used probabilistic graphical model with applications in knowledge discovery and prediction. Learning a Bayesian network (BN) from data can be cast as an optimization problem using the well-known…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-14 Zhenyu A. Liao , Charupriya Sharma , James Cussens , Peter van Beek

Online controlled experiments, colloquially known as A/B-tests, are the bread and butter of real-world recommender system evaluation. Typically, end-users are randomly assigned some system variant, and a plethora of metrics are then…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Olivier Jeunen , Shubham Baweja , Neeti Pokharna , Aleksei Ustimenko

Online experiments (A/B tests) are widely regarded as the gold standard for evaluating recommender system variants and guiding launch decisions. However, a variety of biases can distort the results of the experiment and mislead…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chen Zheng , Zhenyu Zhao