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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

Online controlled experiments are a crucial tool to allow for confident decision-making in technology companies. A North Star metric is defined (such as long-term revenue or user retention), and system variants that statistically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko

Online controlled experiments (A/B testing) are fundamental to data-driven decision-making in many companies. Improving the sensitivity of these experiments under fixed sample size constraints requires reducing the variance of the average…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-24 Zhexiao Lin , Pablo Crespo

Experimentation in online digital platforms is used to inform decision making. Specifically, the goal of many experiments is to optimize a metric of interest. Null hypothesis statistical testing can be ill-suited to this task, as it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-10 Timothy Sudijono , Simon Ejdemyr , Apoorva Lal , Martin Tingley

On-line experimentation (also known as A/B testing) has become an integral part of software development. To timely incorporate user feedback and continuously improve products, many software companies have adopted the culture of agile…

Applications · Statistics 2019-08-13 Yu Wang , Somit Gupta , Jiannan Lu , Ali Mahmoudzadeh , Sophia Liu

Online experiments (A/B tests) are widely regarded as the gold standard for evaluating recommender system variants and guiding launch decisions. However, a variety of biases can distort the results of the experiment and mislead…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chen Zheng , Zhenyu Zhao

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

Participants in online experiments often enroll over time, which can compromise sample representativeness due to temporal shifts in covariates. This issue is particularly critical in A/B tests, online controlled experiments extensively used…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-30 Chen Wang , Shichao Han , Shan Huang

A/B tests are the gold standard for evaluating digital experiences on the web. However, traditional "fixed-horizon" statistical methods are often incompatible with the needs of modern industry practitioners as they do not permit continuous…

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

Effectively measuring, understanding, and improving mobile app performance is of paramount importance for mobile app developers. Across the mobile Internet landscape, companies run online controlled experiments (A/B tests) with thousands of…

Applications · Statistics 2020-12-01 Yuxiang Xie , Meng Xu , Evan Chow , Xiaolin Shi

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

Randomized A/B tests within online learning platforms represent an exciting direction in learning sciences. With minimal assumptions, they allow causal effect estimation without confounding bias and exact statistical inference even in small…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-13 Adam C. Sales , Ethan B. Prihar , Johann A. Gagnon-Bartsch , Neil T. Heffernan

A/B testing is gaining attention in the automotive sector as a promising tool to measure causal effects from software changes. Different from the web-facing businesses, where A/B testing has been well-established, the automotive domain…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Yuchu Liu , David Issa Mattos , Jan Bosch , Helena Holmström Olsson , Jonn Lantz

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

Learning-based robotic systems demand rigorous validation to assure reliable performance, but extensive real-world testing is often prohibitively expensive, and if conducted may still yield insufficient data for high-confidence guarantees.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Rachel Luo , Heng Yang , Michael Watson , Apoorva Sharma , Sushant Veer , Edward Schmerling , Marco Pavone

Many organizations utilize large-scale online controlled experiments (OCEs) to accelerate innovation. Having high statistical power to detect small differences between control and treatment accurately is critical, as even small changes in…

Applications · Statistics 2020-09-11 Ali Mahmoudzadeh , Sophia Liu , Sol Sadeghi , Paul Luo Li , Somit Gupta

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Yongkang Guo , Yuan Yuan , Jinshan Zhang , Yuqing Kong , Zhihua Zhu , Zheng Cai

We describe how to calculate standard errors for A/B tests that include clustered data, ratio metrics, and/or covariate adjustment. We may do this for power analysis/sample size calculations prior to running an experiment using historical…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-12 Tim Hesterberg , Ben Knight

Dealing with distribution shifts is one of the central challenges for modern machine learning. One fundamental situation is the covariate shift, where the input distributions of data change from training to testing stages while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Yu-Jie Zhang , Zhen-Yu Zhang , Peng Zhao , Masashi Sugiyama