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Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
Abstract
Getting numbers is easy; getting numbers you can trust is hard. This practical guide by experimentation leaders at Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft will teach you how to accelerate innovation using trustworthy online controlled experiments, or A/B tests. Based on practical experiences at companies that each run more than 20,000 controlled experiments a year, the authors share examples, pitfalls, and advice for students and industry professionals getting started with experiments, plus deeper dives into advanced topics for practitioners who want to improve the way they make data-driven decisions. Learn how to • Use the scientific method to evaluate hypotheses using controlled experiments • Define key metrics and ideally an Overall Evaluation Criterion • Test for trustworthiness of the results and alert experimenters to violated assumptions • Build a scalable platform that lowers the marginal cost of experiments close to zero • Avoid pitfalls like carryover effects and Twyman's law • Understand how statistical issues play out in practice.
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“Residents examined and gave iterative feedback on two different versions of the EHR tool using A/B testing (a standardized comparison between two versions of a product, commonly used in software design, with different versions presented first or second randomly) (12) as part of a Microsoft PowerPoint slide deck and a virtual whiteboard.”
From Cocreating the ICU-PAUSE Tool for Intensive Care Unit–Ward Transitions (2022) · cites this paper as [12]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kohavi, R., Tang, D., & Xu, Y.
- Affiliations
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- Google (United States) (US)
- LinkedIn (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Kohavi, Ron
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 2020-03-13
- OpenAlex
- W3011423189
- Cited by
- 297
- References
- 235
- Citations by year
- 2026: 64 · 2025: 53 · 2024: 46 · 2023: 39 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 38
- FWCI
- 16.61
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Optimal Experimental Design Methods
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Advanced Causal Inference Techniques
- Keywords
- A/B testing, experimentation, data-driven decision making, hypothesis testing, statistical significance, residual effects
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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