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Accurate estimation of treatment effects in online A/B testing is challenging with zero-inflated and skewed metrics. Traditional tests, like Welch's t-test, often lack sensitivity with heavy-tailed data due to their reliance on means, as…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-07 Kevin Charette , Tristan Boudreault

We propose a novel regression adjustment method designed for estimating distributional treatment effect parameters in randomized experiments. Randomized experiments have been extensively used to estimate treatment effects in various…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-24 Undral Byambadalai , Tatsushi Oka , Shota Yasui

Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Aleksandr Shestakov , Valery Parfenov , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Continuous and efficient experimentation is key to the practical success of user-facing applications on the web, both through online A/B-tests and off-policy evaluation. Despite their shared objective -- estimating the incremental value of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Olivier Jeunen

Background: It has long been advised to account for baseline covariates in the analysis of confirmatory randomised trials, with the main statistical justifications being that this increases power and, when a randomisation scheme balanced…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-09 Tim P. Morris , A. Sarah Walker , Elizabeth J. Williamson , Ian R. White

Covariate adjustment aims to improve the statistical efficiency of randomized trials by incorporating information from baseline covariates. Popular methods for covariate adjustment include analysis of covariance for continuous endpoints and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-09 Zhiwei Zhang , Ya Wang , Dong Xi

The rapid finding of effective therapeutics requires the efficient use of available resources in clinical trials. The use of covariate adjustment can yield statistical estimates with improved precision, resulting in a reduction in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-10 Nicholas Williams , Michael Rosenblum , Iván Díaz

This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-29 Jose Blanchet , Haoxuan Chen , Yiping Lu , Lexing Ying

Covariate adjustment is an important tool in the analysis of randomized clinical trials and observational studies. It can be used to increase efficiency and thus power, and to reduce possible bias. While most statistical tests in randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2011-08-03 Xiaoru Wu , Zhiliang Ying

A variance reduction technique in nonparametric smoothing is proposed: at each point of estimation, form a linear combination of a preliminary estimator evaluated at nearby points with the coefficients specified so that the asymptotic bias…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-08-22 Ming-Yen Cheng , Liang Peng , Jyh-Shyang Wu

In statistics and machine learning, approximation of an intractable integration is often achieved by using the unbiased Monte Carlo estimator, but the variances of the estimation are generally high in many applications. Control variates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-16 Ruosi Wan , Mingjun Zhong , Haoyi Xiong , Zhanxing Zhu

Given n experiment subjects with potentially heterogeneous covariates and two possible treatments, namely active treatment and control, this paper addresses the fundamental question of determining the optimal accuracy in estimating the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-13 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yunxiao Zhao

Adaptive importance sampling for stochastic optimization is a promising approach that offers improved convergence through variance reduction. In this work, we propose a new framework for variance reduction that enables the use of mixtures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-01 Zalán Borsos , Sebastian Curi , Kfir Y. Levy , Andreas Krause

Random features (RFs) are a popular technique to scale up kernel methods in machine learning, replacing exact kernel evaluations with stochastic Monte Carlo estimates. They underpin models as diverse as efficient transformers (by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-04 Isaac Reid , Stratis Markou , Krzysztof Choromanski , Richard E. Turner , Adrian Weller

The complexity of semiparametric models poses new challenges to statistical inference and model selection that frequently arise from real applications. In this work, we propose new estimation and variable selection procedures for the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-03-09 Bo Kai , Runze Li , Hui Zou

We consider in this paper the problem of optimal experiment design where a decision maker can choose which points to sample to obtain an estimate $\hat{\beta}$ of the hidden parameter $\beta^{\star}$ of an underlying linear model. The key…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-01 Xavier Fontaine , Pierre Perrault , Michal Valko , Vianney Perchet

We develop an online gradient algorithm for optimizing the performance of product-form networks through online adjustment of control parameters. The use of standard algorithms for finding optimal parameter settings is hampered by the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-08-31 Jaron Sanders , Sem C. Borst , Johan S. H. van Leeuwaarden

In precision medicine, one of the most important problems is estimating the optimal individualized treatment rules (ITR), which typically involves recommending treatment decisions based on fully observed individual characteristics of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-15 Yue Zhang , Shanshan Luo , Zhi Geng , Yangbo He

In this paper we focus on the solution of online problems with time-varying, linear equality and inequality constraints. Our approach is to design a novel online algorithm by leveraging the tools of control theory. In particular, for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Umberto Casti , Nicola Bastianello , Ruggero Carli , Sandro Zampieri

A general methodology is presented for the construction and effective use of control variates for reversible MCMC samplers. The values of the coefficients of the optimal linear combination of the control variates are computed, and adaptive,…

Computation · Statistics 2010-05-05 Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Petros Dellaportas