Related papers: Learning Metrics that Maximise Power for Accelerat…
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…
Though learning has become a core component of modern information processing, there is now ample evidence that it can lead to biased, unsafe, and prejudiced systems. The need to impose requirements on learning is therefore paramount,…
Underpowered studies (below 50% power) suffer from the winner's curse: A statistically significant positive estimate must exaggerate the true treatment effect to meet the significance threshold. A study by Dipayan Biswas, Annika Abell, and…
While data selection methods have been studied extensively in active learning, data pruning, and data augmentation settings, there is little evidence for the efficacy of these methods in industry scale settings, particularly in low-resource…
We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…
Large-scale randomized experiments, sometimes called A/B tests, are increasingly prevalent in many industries. Though such experiments are often analyzed via frequentist $t$-tests, arguably such analyses are deficient: $p$-values are hard…
This paper investigates simultaneous preference and metric learning from a crowd of respondents. A set of items represented by $d$-dimensional feature vectors and paired comparisons of the form ``item $i$ is preferable to item $j$'' made by…
Most existing distance metric learning methods assume perfect side information that is usually given in pairwise or triplet constraints. Instead, in many real-world applications, the constraints are derived from side information, such as…
When training powerful AI systems to perform complex tasks, it may be challenging to provide training signals which are robust to optimization. One concern is \textit{measurement tampering}, where the AI system manipulates multiple…
We consider the problem of estimating the expected value of information (the knowledge gradient) for Bayesian learning problems where the belief model is nonlinear in the parameters. Our goal is to maximize some metric, while simultaneously…
A common approach to statistical learning with big-data is to randomly split it among $m$ machines and learn the parameter of interest by averaging the $m$ individual estimates. In this paper, focusing on empirical risk minimization, or…
Real-world ecommerce recommender systems must deliver relevant items under strict tens-of-milliseconds latency constraints despite challenges such as cold-start products, rapidly shifting user intent, and dynamic context including…
Statistical significance testing is widely accepted as a means to assess how well a difference in effectiveness reflects an actual difference between systems, as opposed to random noise because of the selection of topics. According to…
Traditional metrics like accuracy, F1-score, and precision are frequently used to evaluate machine learning models, however they may not be sufficient for evaluating performance on tiny, unbalanced, or high-dimensional datasets. A…
Effective exploration is believed to positively influence the long-term user experience on recommendation platforms. Determining its exact benefits, however, has been challenging. Regular A/B tests on exploration often measure neutral or…
We propose a nonparametric sequential test that aims to address two practical problems pertinent to online randomized experiments: (i) how to do a hypothesis test for complex metrics; (ii) how to prevent type $1$ error inflation under…
The continuous net reclassification improvement (NRI) statistic is a popular model change measure that was developed to assess the incremental value of new factors in a risk prediction model. Two prominent statistical issues identified in…
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower…
In nonstandard testing environments, researchers often derive ad hoc tests with correct (asymptotic) size, but their optimality properties are typically unknown a priori and difficult to assess. This paper develops a numerical framework for…
Research often necessitates of samples, yet obtaining large enough samples is not always possible. When it is, the researcher may use one of two methods for deciding upon the required sample size: rules-of-thumb, quick yet uncertain, and…