Paper

Rapid and Scalable Bayesian AB Testing

Goswami, Bud, Pangerl, Christian, Maher, Andrew, Bae, Jae Hyeon, Prabanantham, Subash, Chennu, Srivas, Martin, Jamie

2023

Overview

AB testing aids business operators with their decision making, and is considered the gold standard method for learning from data to improve digital user experiences. However, there is usually a gap between the requirements of practitioners, and the constraints imposed by the statistical hypothesis testing methodologies commonly used for analysis of AB tests. These include the lack of statistical power in multivariate designs with many factors, correlations between these factors, the need of sequential testing for early stopping, and the inability to pool knowledge from past tests. Here, we propose a solution that applies hierarchical Bayesian estimation to address the above limitations. In comparison to current sequential AB testing methodology, we increase statistical power by exploiting correlations between factors, enabling sequential testing and progressive early stopping, without incurring excessive false positive risk. We also demonstrate how this methodology can be extended to enable the extraction of composite global learnings from past AB tests, to accelerate future tests. We underpin our work with a solid theoretical framework that articulates the value of hierarchical estimation. We demonstrate its utility using both numerical simulations and a large set of real-world AB tests. Together, these results highlight the practical value of our approach for statistical inference in the technology industry.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Bayesian analysis / Decision making / Hypothesis testing / Statistical inference / Statistical power / User experience