Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments

This practical guide for students, researchers and practitioners offers real world guidance for data-driven decision making and innovation.

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.

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.