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Variance and significance in large-scale online services

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

Well, it turns out that depending on what it cares to measure, an LSOS might not have enough data. The practical consequence of this is that we can’t afford to be sloppy about measuring statistical significance and confidence intervals. Being dimensionless, it is a simple measure of the variability of a (non-negative) random variable.

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Changing assignment weights with time-based confounders

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

For the first example, consider a small website that is a platform for content on personal finance. How willing your users are to engage with personal finance content depends on whether or not it’s the weekend. For this reason we don’t report uncertainty measures or statistical significance in the results of the simulation.

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LSOS experiments: how I learned to stop worrying and love the variability

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

For instance, the product offering of a personal finance website might be very different in different countries and hence conversion rates (acceptances per offer) might differ considerably by country. And since the metric average is different in each hour of day, this is a source of variation in measuring the experimental effect.