Related papers: When Does Interference Matter? Decision-Making in …
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…
Network interference has attracted significant attention in the field of causal inference, encapsulating various sociological behaviors where the treatment assigned to one individual within a network may affect the outcomes of others, such…
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…
The fundamental problem of causal inference -- that we never observe counterfactuals -- prevents us from identifying how many might be negatively affected by a proposed intervention. If, in an A/B test, half of users click (or buy, or…
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…
Classical approaches to experimental design assume that intervening on one unit does not affect other units. There are many important settings, however, where this non-interference assumption does not hold, as when running experiments on…
We present current methods for estimating treatment effects and spillover effects under "interference", a term which covers a broad class of situations in which a unit's outcome depends not only on treatments received by that unit, but also…
Recommender systems have become an integral part of online platforms, providing personalized recommendations for purchases, content consumption, and interpersonal connections. These systems consist of two sides: the producer side comprises…
This paper studies the measurement of advertising effects on online platforms when parallel experimentation occurs, that is, when multiple advertisers experiment concurrently. It provides a framework that makes precise how parallel…
If an experimental treatment is experienced by both treated and control group units, tests of hypotheses about causal effects may be difficult to conceptualize let alone execute. In this paper, we show how counterfactual causal models may…
When interpreting A/B tests, we typically focus only on the statistically significant results and take them by face value. This practice, termed post-selection inference in the statistical literature, may negatively affect both point…
Interference is a ubiquitous problem in experiments conducted on two-sided content marketplaces, such as Douyin (China's analog of TikTok). In many cases, creators are the natural unit of experimentation, but creators interfere with each…
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…
Online A/B testing is widely used in the internet industry to inform decisions on new feature roll-outs. For online marketplaces (such as advertising markets), standard approaches to A/B testing may lead to biased results when buyers…
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…
Information retrieval systems, such as online marketplaces, news feeds, and search engines, are ubiquitous in today's digital society. They facilitate information discovery by ranking retrieved items on predicted relevance, i.e. likelihood…
This paper investigates the case of interference, when a unit's treatment also affects other units' outcome. When interference is at work, policy evaluation mostly relies on the use of randomized experiments under cluster interference and…
In this paper, we draw attention to a problem that is often overlooked or ignored by companies practicing hypothesis testing (A/B testing) in online environments. We show that conducting experiments on limited inventory that is shared…
Causal inference with interference is a rapidly growing area. The literature has begun to relax the "no-interference" assumption that the treatment received by one individual does not affect the outcomes of other individuals. In this paper…
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…