Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments

Ron Kohavi is a Technical Fellow and corporate VP of Microsoft's Analysis and Experimentation, and was previously director of data mining and personalization at Amazon. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His papers have over 40,000 citations and three of them are in the top 1,000 most-cited papers in Computer Science. Diane Tang is a Google Fellow, with expertise in large-scale data analysis and infrastructure, online controlled experiments, and ads systems. She has an A.B. from Harvard and an M.S./Ph.D. from Stanford University, with patents and publications in mobile networking, information visualization, experiment methodology, data infrastructure, data mining, and large data. Ya Xu heads Data Science and Experimentation at LinkedIn. She has published several papers on experimentation and is a frequent speaker at top-tier conferences and universities. She previously worked at Microsoft and received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University.

'At the core of the Lean Methodology is the scientific method: Creating hypotheses, running experiments, gathering data, extracting insight and validation or modification of the hypothesis. A/B testing is the gold standard of creating verifiable and repeatable experiments, and this book is its definitive text.' Steve Blank, Adjunct professor at Stanford University, father of modern entrepreneurship, author of The Startup Owner's Manual and The Four Steps to the Epiphany

• Preface – how to read this book; 1. Introduction and motivation; 2. Running and analyzing experiments: an end-to-end example; 3. Twyman's law and experimentation trustworthiness; 4. Experimentation platform and culture; Part II: 5. Speed matters: an end-to-end case study; 6. Organizational metrics; 7. Metrics for experimentation and the Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC); 8. Institutional memory and aeta-analysis; 9. Ethics in controlled experiments; Part III: 10. Complementary techniques; 11. Observational causal studies; Part IV: 12. Client-side experiments; 13. Instrumentation; 14. Choosing a randomization unit; 15. Ramping experiment exposure: trading off speed, quality, and risk; 16. Scaling experiment analyses; Part V: 17. The statistics behind online controlled experiments; 18. Variance estimation and improved sensitivity: pitfalls and solutions; 19. The A/A test; 20. Triggering for improved sensitivity; 21. Guardrail metrics; 22. Leakage and interference between variants; 23. Measuring long-term treatment effects.