Related papers: Pigeonhole Design: Balancing Sequential Experiment…
e consider the experimental design problem in an online environment, an important practical task for reducing the variance of estimates in randomized experiments which allows for greater precision, and in turn, improved decision making. In…
Controlled experiments are widely used in many applications to investigate the causal relationship between input factors and experimental outcomes. A completely randomized design is usually used to randomly assign treatment levels to…
Causal analyses for observational studies are often complicated by covariate imbalances among treatment groups, and matching methodologies alleviate this complication by finding subsets of treatment groups that exhibit covariate balance. It…
Suppose an online platform wants to compare a treatment and control policy, e.g., two different matching algorithms in a ridesharing system, or two different inventory management algorithms in an online retail site. Standard randomized…
In order for an e-commerce platform to maximize its revenue, it must recommend customers items they are most likely to purchase. However, the company often has business constraints on these items, such as the number of each item in stock.…
The pigeonhole principle states that if $n$ items are contained in $m$ boxes, then at least one box has no more than $n / m$ items. It is utilized to solve many data management problems, especially for thresholded similarity searches.…
A/B testing, or controlled experiments, is the gold standard approach to causally compare the performance of algorithms on online platforms. However, conventional Bernoulli randomization in A/B testing faces many challenges such as…
In clinical trials, there is potential to improve precision and reduce the required sample size by appropriately adjusting for baseline variables in the statistical analysis. This is called covariate adjustment. Despite recommendations by…
Online A/B tests have become increasingly popular and important for social platforms. However, accurately estimating the global average treatment effect (GATE) has proven to be challenging due to network interference, which violates the…
Current approaches to A/B testing in networks focus on limiting interference, the concern that treatment effects can "spill over" from treatment nodes to control nodes and lead to biased causal effect estimation. Prominent methods for…
Bin packing is a classic optimization problem with a wide range of applications, from load balancing to supply chain management. In this work, we study the online variant of the problem, in which a sequence of items of various sizes must be…
We consider the optimal experimental design problem of allocating subjects to treatment or control when subjects participate in multiple, separate controlled experiments within a short time-frame and subject covariate information is…
Judging scholarly posters creates a challenge to assign the judges efficiently. If there are many posters and few reviews per judge, the commonly used Balanced Incomplete Block Design is not a feasible option. An additional challenge is an…
Restricting randomization in the design of experiments (e.g., using blocking/stratification, pair-wise matching, or rerandomization) can improve the treatment-control balance on important covariates and therefore improve the estimation of…
We present a new experimental design procedure that divides a set of experimental units into two groups in order to minimize error in estimating an additive treatment effect. One concern is minimizing error at the experimental design stage…
In sequential experiments, subjects become available for the study over a period of time, and covariates are often measured at the time of arrival. We consider the setting where the sample size is fixed but covariate values are unknown…
Completely randomized experiments have been the gold standard for drawing causal inference because they can balance all potential confounding on average. However, they may suffer from unbalanced covariates for realized treatment…
Online experiments in ads, recommendation, and member-experience systems are often planned before the dominant interference mechanism is known. A treatment may propagate through budgets, inventory, producer exposure, graph spillovers, or…
Computer experiments have become an indispensable alternative to complex physical and engineering experiments. The Kriging model is the most widely used surrogate model, with the core goal of minimizing the discrepancy between the surrogate…
Switchback experiments, where a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to random treatments, are among the most prevalent designs used in the technology sector, with applications ranging from ride-hailing platforms to online…