13,706 research outputs found
Designing and Deploying Online Field Experiments
Online experiments are widely used to compare specific design alternatives,
but they can also be used to produce generalizable knowledge and inform
strategic decision making. Doing so often requires sophisticated experimental
designs, iterative refinement, and careful logging and analysis. Few tools
exist that support these needs. We thus introduce a language for online field
experiments called PlanOut. PlanOut separates experimental design from
application code, allowing the experimenter to concisely describe experimental
designs, whether common "A/B tests" and factorial designs, or more complex
designs involving conditional logic or multiple experimental units. These
latter designs are often useful for understanding causal mechanisms involved in
user behaviors. We demonstrate how experiments from the literature can be
implemented in PlanOut, and describe two large field experiments conducted on
Facebook with PlanOut. For common scenarios in which experiments are run
iteratively and in parallel, we introduce a namespaced management system that
encourages sound experimental practice.Comment: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web,
283-29
Structural Agnostic Modeling: Adversarial Learning of Causal Graphs
A new causal discovery method, Structural Agnostic Modeling (SAM), is
presented in this paper. Leveraging both conditional independencies and
distributional asymmetries in the data, SAM aims at recovering full causal
models from continuous observational data along a multivariate non-parametric
setting. The approach is based on a game between players estimating each
variable distribution conditionally to the others as a neural net, and an
adversary aimed at discriminating the overall joint conditional distribution,
and that of the original data. An original learning criterion combining
distribution estimation, sparsity and acyclicity constraints is used to enforce
the end-to-end optimization of the graph structure and parameters through
stochastic gradient descent. Besides the theoretical analysis of the approach
in the large sample limit, SAM is extensively experimentally validated on
synthetic and real data
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