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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

Randomized control trials (RCTs) have been the gold standard to evaluate the effectiveness of a program, policy, or treatment on an outcome of interest. However, many RCTs assume that study participants are willing to share their…

Applications · Statistics 2021-12-07 Manjusha Kancharla , Hyunseung Kang

Online controlled experiments, or A/B tests, are large-scale randomized trials in digital environments. This paper investigates the estimands of the difference-in-means estimator in these experiments, focusing on scenarios with repeated…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-12 Sebastian Ankargren , Mattias Frånberg , Mårten Schultzberg

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT)s are relied upon to assess new treatments, but suffer from limited power to guide personalized treatment decisions. On the other hand, observational (i.e., non-experimental) studies have large and diverse…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-07 Zeshan Hussain , Ming-Chieh Shih , Michael Oberst , Ilker Demirel , David Sontag

A/B tests serve the purpose of reliably identifying the effect of changes introduced in online services. It is common for online platforms to run a large number of simultaneous experiments by splitting incoming user traffic randomly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Alexander Buchholz , Vito Bellini , Giuseppe Di Benedetto , Yannik Stein , Matteo Ruffini , Fabian Moerchen

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) represent a gold standard when developing policy guidelines. However, RCTs are often narrow, and lack data on broader populations of interest. Causal effects in these populations are often estimated using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Zeshan Hussain , Michael Oberst , Ming-Chieh Shih , David Sontag

Confounding is a significant obstacle to unbiased estimation of causal effects from observational data. For settings with high-dimensional covariates -- such as text data, genomics, or the behavioral social sciences -- researchers have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Katherine A. Keith , Sergey Feldman , David Jurgens , Jonathan Bragg , Rohit Bhattacharya

Randomized experiments have become a cornerstone of evidence-based decision-making in contexts ranging from online platforms to public health. However, in experimental settings with network interference, a unit's treatment can influence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sadegh Shirani , Yuwei Luo , William Overman , Ruoxuan Xiong , Mohsen Bayati

A fundamental question for companies with large amount of logged data is: How to use such logged data together with incoming streaming data to make good decisions? Many companies currently make decisions via online A/B tests, but wrong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Li Ye , Yishi Lin , Hong Xie , John C. S. Lui

Evaluating the causal effect of recommendations is an important objective because the causal effect on user interactions can directly leads to an increase in sales and user engagement. To select an optimal recommendation model, it is common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Masahiro Sato

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

Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Joseph B. Bak-Coleman , Stephan Lewandowsky , Philipp Lorenz-Spreen , Arvind Narayanan , Amy Orben , Lisa Oswald

User-randomized A/B testing has emerged as the gold standard for online experimentation. However, when this kind of approach is not feasible due to legal, ethical or practical considerations, experimenters have to consider alternatives like…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-17 Paul Missault , Lorenzo Masoero , Christian Delbé , Thomas Richardson , Guido Imbens

We have seen a massive growth of online experiments at LinkedIn, and in industry at large. It is now more important than ever to create an intelligent A/B platform that can truly democratize A/B testing by allowing everyone to make quality…

Applications · Statistics 2018-08-02 Nanyu Chen , Min Liu , Ya Xu

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are pivotal in generating internally valid estimates with minimal assumptions, serving as a cornerstone for researchers dedicated to advancing causal inference methods. However, extending these findings…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-28 Melody Y Huang , Harsh Parikh

Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yiheng Duan , Stephanie Zhang , Lihong Li

A challenge that machine learning practitioners in the industry face is the task of selecting the best model to deploy in production. As a model is often an intermediate component of a production system, online controlled experiments such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-31 Zhenwen Dai , Praveen Chandar , Ghazal Fazelnia , Ben Carterette , Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke

Online experimentation, also known as A/B testing, is the gold standard for measuring product impacts and making business decisions in the tech industry. The validity and utility of experiments, however, hinge on unbiasedness and sufficient…

Applications · Statistics 2020-12-17 Min Liu , Jialiang Mao , Kang Kang

Causal machine learning has the potential to revolutionize decision-making by combining the predictive power of machine learning algorithms with the theory of causal inference. However, these methods remain underutilized by the broader…

Understanding causality should be a core requirement of any attempt to build real impact through AI. Due to the inherent unobservability of counterfactuals, large randomised trials (RCTs) are the standard for causal inference. But large…