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The rise of internet-based services and products in the late 1990's brought about an unprecedented opportunity for online businesses to engage in large scale data-driven decision making. Over the past two decades, organizations such as…

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) often suffer from limited inferential efficiency in estimating treatment effects due to their small sample sizes. In recent years, incorporating external controls (ECs) has gained increasing attention as…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-16 Qinwei Yang , Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Shu Yang

There is a growing literature on design-based methods to estimate average treatment effects for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) using the underpinnings of experiments. In this article, we build on these methods to consider design-based…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-17 Peter Z Schochet

A B testing serves as the gold standard for large scale, data driven decision making in online businesses. To mitigate metric variability and enhance testing sensitivity, control variates and regression adjustment have emerged as prominent…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-13 Yu Zhang , Bokui Wan , Yongli Qin

We propose a novel multi-task neural network approach for estimating distributional treatment effects (DTE) in randomized experiments. While DTE provides more granular insights into the experiment outcomes over conventional methods focusing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Tomu Hirata , Undral Byambadalai , Tatsushi Oka , Shota Yasui , Shingo Uto

Randomized experiments in which the treatment of a unit can affect the outcomes of other units are becoming increasingly common in healthcare, economics, and in the social and information sciences. From a causal inference perspective, the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-02-14 Daniel L. Sussman , Edoardo M. Airoldi

A high-quality experimental dataset is often much smaller than a corresponding observational dataset. When this holds with possibly biased measurements of the outcome of interest in the latter, we propose an estimation and inference…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Harrison H Li

In randomized experiments, the classic Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) posits that the outcome for one experimental unit is unaffected by the treatment assignments of other units. However, this assumption is frequently…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-18 Yiming Jiang , He Wang

While there exists a large amount of literature on the general challenges of and best practices for trustworthy online A/B testing, there are limited studies on sample size estimation, which plays a crucial role in trustworthy and efficient…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-21 Jing Zhou , Jiannan Lu , Anas Shallah

A/B-tests are a cornerstone of experimental design on the web, with wide-ranging applications and use-cases. The statistical $t$-test comparing differences in means is the most commonly used method for assessing treatment effects, often…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-25 Olivier Jeunen

Online experimentation with interference is a common challenge in modern applications such as e-commerce and adaptive clinical trials in medicine. For example, in online marketplaces, the revenue of a good depends on discounts applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Abhineet Agarwal , Anish Agarwal , Lorenzo Masoero , Justin Whitehouse

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

A/B tests are randomized experiments frequently used by companies that offer services on the Web for assessing the impact of new features. During an experiment, each user is randomly redirected to one of two versions of the website, called…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Francisco Galuppo Azevedo , Bruno Demattos Nogueira , Fabricio Murai , Ana Paula Couto da Silva

Network interference occurs when a unit's outcome depends not only on its own treatment but also on the treatments received by connected units in the network. Experimental designs and analysis methods that ignore such interference can yield…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-04 Xiao Liu , Feifang Hu , Jingfei Zhang

It is valuable for any decision maker to know the impact of decisions (treatments) on average and for subgroups. The causal machine learning literature has recently provided tools for estimating group average treatment effects (GATE) to…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-01-10 Nora Bearth , Michael Lechner

We address the problem of A/B testing, a widely used protocol for evaluating the potential improvement achieved by a new decision system compared to a baseline. This protocol segments the population into two subgroups, each exposed to a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-16 Otmane Sakhi , Alexandre Gilotte , David Rohde

Heavy-tailed metrics are common and often critical to product evaluation in the online world. While we may have samples large enough for Central Limit Theorem to kick in, experimentation is challenging due to the wide confidence interval of…

Applications · Statistics 2019-05-23 Jason , Wang , Pauline Burke

Evaluation plays a crucial role in the development of ranking algorithms on search and recommender systems. It enables online platforms to create user-friendly features that drive commercial success in a steady and effective manner. The…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Qing Zhang , Alex Deng , Michelle Du , Huiji Gao , Liwei He , Sanjeev Katariya

A/B tests, also known as randomized controlled experiments (RCTs), are the gold standard for evaluating the impact of new policies, products, or decisions. However, these tests can be costly in terms of time and resources, potentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Shima Nassiri , Mohsen Bayati , Joe Cooprider

Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However, experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Smitha Milli , Luca Belli , Moritz Hardt