English
Related papers

Related papers: On Heavy-user Bias in A/B Testing

200 papers

To improve the reliability and efficiency of Web Software, the Testing Team should be creative and innovative. The experience and intuition of Tester also matters a lot and most often the destructive nature of Tester brings reliable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Kamran Ali , Xia Xiaoling

When interpreting A/B tests, we typically focus only on the statistically significant results and take them by face value. This practice, termed post-selection inference in the statistical literature, may negatively affect both point…

Applications · Statistics 2021-06-01 Alex Deng , Yicheng Li , Jiannan Lu , Vivek Ramamurthy

As software systems continue to grow in complexity, testing has become a fundamental part of ensuring the quality and reliability of software products. Yet, software testing is still often perceived, both in industry and academia, as a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Davi Gama Hardman , Cesar França , Brody Stuart-Verner , Ronnie de Souza Santos

A/B testing is a widely-used paradigm within marketing optimization because it promises identification of causal effects and because it is implemented out of the box in most messaging delivery software platforms. Modern businesses, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Schaun Wheeler

Online controlled experiments, now commonly known as A/B testing, are crucial to causal inference and data driven decision making in many internet based businesses. While a simple comparison between a treatment (the feature under test) and…

Applications · Statistics 2015-01-05 Yu Guo , Alex Deng

The standard A/B testing approaches are mostly based on t-test in large scale industry applications. These standard approaches however suffers from low statistical power in business settings, due to nature of small sample-size or…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-30 Changshuai Wei , Phuc Nguyen , Benjamin Zelditch , Joyce Chen

Innovations across science and industry are evaluated using randomized trials (a.k.a. A/B tests). While simple and robust, such static designs are inefficient or infeasible for testing many hypotheses. Adaptive designs can greatly improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Jimmy Wang , Ethan Che , Daniel R. Jiang , Hongseok Namkoong

Development of the majority of the leading web services and software products today is generally guided by data-driven decisions based on evaluation that ensures a steady stream of updates, both in terms of quality and quantity. Large…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Roman Budylin , Alexey Drutsa , Gleb Gusev , Pavel Serdyukov , Igor Yashkov

Adaptive online testing efficiently assesses examinee proficiency by dynamically adjusting the difficulty of test items based on their performance. To achieve this, items are selected so that their difficulty closely matches the test…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-21 Hideo Hirose

A/B tests have been widely adopted across industries as the golden rule that guides decision making. However, the long-term true north metrics we ultimately want to drive through A/B test may take a long time to mature. In these situations,…

Applications · Statistics 2021-06-04 Weitao Duan , Shan Ba , Chunzhe Zhang

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

Recommendation systems have been integrated into the majority of large online systems to filter and rank information according to user profiles. It thus influences the way users interact with the system and, as a consequence, bias the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2015-11-05 Arnaud De Myttenaere , Boris Golden , Bénédicte Le Grand , Fabrice Rossi

A/B testing is the foundation of decision-making in online platforms, yet social products often suffer from network interference: user interactions cause treatment effects to spill over into the control group. Such spillovers bias causal…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xu Min , Zhaoxu Yang , Kaixuan Tan , Juan Yan , Xunbin Xiong , Zihao Zhu , Kaiyu Zhu , Fenglin Cui , Yang Yang , Sihua Yang , Jianhui Bu

Online reinforcement learning and other adaptive sampling algorithms are increasingly used in digital intervention experiments to optimize treatment delivery for users over time. In this work, we focus on longitudinal user data collected by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Kelly W. Zhang , Lucas Janson , Susan A. Murphy

Many organizations utilize large-scale online controlled experiments (OCEs) to accelerate innovation. Having high statistical power to detect small differences between control and treatment accurately is critical, as even small changes in…

Applications · Statistics 2020-09-11 Ali Mahmoudzadeh , Sophia Liu , Sol Sadeghi , Paul Luo Li , Somit Gupta

From scientific experiments to online A/B testing, the previously observed data often affects how future experiments are performed, which in turn affects which data will be collected. Such adaptivity introduces complex correlations between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-03 Xinkun Nie , Xiaoying Tian , Jonathan Taylor , James Zou

In this paper, we examine the biases that arise when firms run A/B tests on continuous parameters to estimate global treatment effects on performance metrics of interest; we particularly focus on price experiments to measure the price…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-22 Ramesh Johari , Orrie B. Page , Gabriel Y. Weintraub

Online controlled experiments, also known as A/B testing, are the digital equivalent of randomized controlled trials for estimating the impact of marketing campaigns on website visitors. Stratified sampling is a traditional technique for…

\textit{Background:} The use of large language models in software testing is growing fast as they support numerous tasks, from test case generation to automation, and documentation. However, their adoption often relies on informal…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Maria Deolinda Santana , Cleyton Magalhaes , Ronnie de Souza Santos

Design of experiments and estimation of treatment effects in large-scale networks, in the presence of strong interference, is a challenging and important problem. Most existing methods' performance deteriorates as the density of the network…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-15 Preetam Nandy , Kinjal Basu , Shaunak Chatterjee , Ye Tu