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Randomized experiments, or "A/B" tests, remain the gold standard for evaluating the causal effect of a policy intervention or product change. However, experimental settings, such as social networks, where users are interacting and…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Yuan Yuan , Kristen M. Altenburger , Farshad Kooti

A/B testing is a standard approach for evaluating the effect of online experiments; the goal is to estimate the `average treatment effect' of a new feature or condition by exposing a sample of the overall population to it. A drawback with…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2013-05-31 Johan Ugander , Brian Karrer , Lars Backstrom , Jon Kleinberg

Experimental testing is vital in the optimization of web applications, and as such A/B testing has been widely adopted as a methodology for determining optimal content for many web applications. While some testing platforms provide…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-04 Ian E. Fellows

We consider the problem of variance reduction in randomized controlled trials, through the use of covariates correlated with the outcome but independent of the treatment. We propose a machine learning regression-adjusted treatment effect…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-07 Yongyi Guo , Dominic Coey , Mikael Konutgan , Wenting Li , Chris Schoener , Matt Goldman

Online controlled experiments are the primary tool for measuring the causal impact of product changes in digital businesses. It is increasingly common for digital products and services to interact with customers in a personalised way. Using…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-02 C. H. Bryan Liu , Benjamin Paul Chamberlain

During the last few decades, online controlled experiments (also known as A/B tests) have been adopted as a golden standard for measuring business improvements in industry. In our company, there are more than a billion users participating…

Applications · Statistics 2021-08-06 Tao Xiong , Yihan Bao , Penglei Zhao , Yong Wang

Companies offering web services routinely run randomized online experiments to estimate the causal impact associated with the adoption of new features and policies on key performance metrics of interest. These experiments are used to…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-13 Lorenzo Masoero , Doug Hains , James McQueen

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

We consider the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects with arbitrary machine learning methods in the presence of unobserved confounders with the aid of a valid instrument. Such settings arise in A/B tests with an intent-to-treat…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-06-07 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Victor Lei , Miruna Oprescu , Maggie Hei , Keith Battocchi , Greg Lewis

The widespread adoption of online randomized controlled experiments (A/B Tests) for decision-making has created ongoing capacity constraints which necessitate interim analyses. As a consequence, platform users are increasingly motivated to…

Applications · Statistics 2025-11-11 Abbas Zaidi , Rina Friedberg , Samir Khan , Yao-Yang Leow , Maulik Soneji , Houssam Nassif , Richard Mudd

Online evaluation of machine learning models is typically conducted through A/B experiments. Sequential statistical tests are valuable tools for analysing these experiments, as they enable researchers to stop data collection early without…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-08 Alexey Kurennoy , Majed Dodin , Tural Gurbanov , Ana Peleteiro Ramallo

Assessing uncertainty is an important step towards ensuring the safety and reliability of machine learning systems. Existing uncertainty estimation techniques may fail when their modeling assumptions are not met, e.g. when the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-24 Volodymyr Kuleshov , Stefano Ermon

A/B testing has become the cornerstone of decision-making in online markets, guiding how platforms launch new features, optimize pricing strategies, and improve user experience. In practice, we typically employ the pairwise $t$-test to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Junpeng Gong , Chunkai Wang , Hao Li , Jinyong Ma , Haoxuan Li , Xu He

Randomized artificial neural networks such as extreme learning machines provide an attractive and efficient method for supervised learning under limited computing ressources and green machine learning. This especially applies when equipping…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-02 Ansgar Steland , Bart E. Pieters

Machine Learning and AI have the potential to transform data-driven scientific discovery, enabling accurate predictions for several scientific phenomena. As many scientific questions are inherently causal, this paper looks at the causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Riccardo Cadei , Lukas Lindorfer , Sylvia Cremer , Cordelia Schmid , Francesco Locatello

When developing a new networking algorithm, it is established practice to run a randomized experiment, or A/B test, to evaluate its performance. In an A/B test, traffic is randomly allocated between a treatment group, which uses the new…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-10-04 Bruce Spang , Veronica Hannan , Shravya Kunamalla , Te-Yuan Huang , Nick McKeown , Ramesh Johari

Linear models are foundational tools in statistics and ubiquitous across the applied sciences. However, conventional statistical inference -- such as $t$-tests and $F$-tests -- are only valid at fixed sample sizes, making them unsuitable…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-08 Michael Lindon , Dae Woong Ham , Martin Tingley , Iavor Bojinov

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

Online learning methods yield sequential regret bounds under minimal assumptions and provide in-expectation risk bounds for statistical learning. However, despite the apparent advantage of online guarantees over their statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Dirk van der Hoeven , Nikita Zhivotovskiy , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We argue that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are special even among settings where average treatment effects are identified by a nonparametric unconfoundedness assumption. This claim follows from two results of Robins and Ritov (1997):…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-28 P. M. Aronow , James M. Robins , Theo Saarinen , Fredrik Sävje , Jasjeet Sekhon