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Experiment design and modeling for long-term studies in ads

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

by HENNING HOHNHOLD, DEIRDRE O'BRIEN, and DIANE TANG In this post we discuss the challenges in measuring and modeling the long-term effect of ads on user behavior. We describe experiment designs which have proven effective for us and discuss the subtleties of trying to generalize the results via modeling.

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Changing assignment weights with time-based confounders

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

In practice, one may want to use more complex models to make these estimates. For example, one may want to use a model that can pool the epoch estimates with each other via hierarchical modeling (a.k.a. These MAB algorithms are great at maximizing reward when the models are perfectly specified and probabilities are accurate.

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Using Empirical Bayes to approximate posteriors for large "black box" estimators

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

But most common machine learning methods don’t give posteriors, and many don’t have explicit probability models. More precisely, our model is that $theta$ is drawn from a prior that depends on $t$, then $y$ comes from some known parametric family $f_theta$. Here, our items are query-ad pairs. Calculate posterior quantities of interest.

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Explaining black-box models using attribute importance, PDPs, and LIME

Domino Data Lab

In this article we cover explainability for black-box models and show how to use different methods from the Skater framework to provide insights into the inner workings of a simple credit scoring neural network model. The interest in interpretation of machine learning has been rapidly accelerating in the last decade. See Ribeiro et al.

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