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Adaptive Experimentation with Delayed Binary Feedback

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Conducting experiments with objectives that take significant delays to materialize (e.g. conversions, add-to-cart events, etc.) is challenging. Although the classical “split sample testing” is still valid for the delayed feedback, the experiment will take longer to complete, which also means spending more resources on worse-performing strategies due to their fixed allocation schedules. Alternatively, adaptive approaches such as “multi-armed bandits” are able to effectively reduce the cost of experimentation. But these methods generally cannot handle delayed objectives directly out of the box. This paper presents an adaptive experimentation solution tailored for delayed binary feedback objectives by estimating the real underlying objectives before they materialize and dynamically allocating variants based on the estimates. Experiments show that the proposed method is more efficient for delayed feedback compared to various other approaches and is robust in different settings. In addition, we describe an experimentation product powered by this algorithm. This product is currently deployed in the online experimentation platform of JD.com, a large e-commerce company and a publisher of digital ads.

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)A/B testingJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112011211:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Dually Enhanced Delayed Feedback Modeling for Streaming Conversion Rate PredictionProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3614856(390-399)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Variance Reduction Using In-Experiment Data: Efficient and Targeted Online Measurement for Sparse and Delayed OutcomesProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3580305.3599928(3937-3946)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
    • Show More Cited By

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
          April 2022
          3764 pages
          ISBN:9781450390965
          DOI:10.1145/3485447
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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          Publication History

          Published: 25 April 2022

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          Author Tags

          1. Conversion Rate
          2. Delayed Feedback
          3. Deployed System
          4. Display Ads
          5. Experimentation Platform
          6. Multi-armed Bandit

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          WWW '22
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          WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
          April 25 - 29, 2022
          Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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          Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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          Cited By

          View all
          • (2024)A/B testingJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112011211:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
          • (2023)Dually Enhanced Delayed Feedback Modeling for Streaming Conversion Rate PredictionProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3614856(390-399)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
          • (2023)Variance Reduction Using In-Experiment Data: Efficient and Targeted Online Measurement for Sparse and Delayed OutcomesProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3580305.3599928(3937-3946)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
          • (2023)Online Conversion Rate Prediction via Neural Satellite Networks in Delayed Feedback AdvertisingProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591747(1406-1415)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023

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