Articles from 2017

The Importance of Statistical Power in Online A/B Testing

Statistical Power and Test Sensitivity

What is Statistical Power? In null-hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) – the procedure most commonly applied in A/B tests, there are two types of errors that practitioners should care about, type I and type II errors. Type I is the probability of the test procedure to falsely reject a true null hypothesis. Type II error is […] Read more…

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5 Reasons to Go Bayesian in AB Testing – Debunked

Frequentist vs Bayesian A/B Testing

As someone who spent a good deal of time on trying to figure out how to run A/B tests properly and efficiently, I was intrigued to find a slide from a presentation by VWO®’s data scientist Chris Stucchio, where he goes over the main reasons that caused him and the VWO® team to consider and […] Read more…

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The Bane of AB Testing: Reaching Statistical Significance

Illusory Results AB Testing

Now, this is not a new topic on this blog. I’ve discussed the issue of optional stopping based on “achieving” or “reaching” statistical significance in my Why Every Internet Marketer Should be a Statistician post more than two years ago and others have touched on it as well – both before and after me. However, the issue […] Read more…

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Bayesian AB Testing is Not Immune to Optional Stopping Issues

Fantasy vs real world in bayesian ab testing

Fantasy vs the Real World: Naive Bayesian AB Testing vs Proper Statistical Inference This post is addressed at a certain camp of proponents and practitioners of A/B testing based on Bayesian statistical methods, who claim that outcome-based optional stopping, often called data peeking or data-driven stopping, has no effect on the statistics and thus inferences […] Read more…

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