John Mount Ph. D.
Data Scientist at Win-Vector LLC
An A/B test is a very simple controlled experiment where one group is subject to a new treatment (often group "B") and the other group (often group "A") is considered a control group. The classic example is attempting to compare defect rates of two production processes (the current process, and perhaps a new machine).
Illustration: Boris Artzybasheff (photo James Vaughan, some rights reserved)In our time an A/B test typically compares the conversion to sales rate of different web-traffic sources or different web-advertising creatives (like industrial defects, a low rate process). An A/B test uses a randomized "at the same time" test design to help mitigate the impact of any possible interfering or omitted variables. So you do not run "A" on Monday and then "B" on Tuesday, but instead continuously route a fraction of your customers to each treatment. Roughly a complete "test design" is: how much traffic to route to A, how much traffic to route to B, and how to chose A versus B after the results are available. A/B testing is one of the simplest controlled experimental design problems possible (and one of the simplest examples of a Markov decision process). And that is part of the problem: it is likely the first time a person will need to truly worry about:
- Power/Significance
- Design of experiments
- Defining utility
- Priors or beliefs
- Efficiency of inference
All of these are technical terms we will touch on in this article. However, we argue the biggest sticking point of A/B testing is: it requires a lot more communication between the business partner (sponsoring the test) and the analyst (designing and implementing the test) than a statistician or data scientist would care to admit. In this first article of a new series called "statistics as it should be" we will discuss some of the essential issues in planning A/B tests. To continue please click here.
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