A/B Testing Significance Calculator | Hacker News Reader

A/B Testing Significance Calculator

jeffpickhardt.com

62 pointsbvanvugt24 comments

I agree with other critiques here that this A/B testing calculator does little to add to the conversation, and someone who uses it would be mislead in how to interpret results.

The procedure my team uses is:

1) hypothesize an expected conversion rate and whether to use a one-sided test (if we're testing that the state of the world remains unchanged) or a two-sided test (if we're testing that that the state of the world has changed as a result of the variation)

2) run those numbers through this power/sample size calculator to determine the number of visitors we need before we can analyze the experiment: http://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/b2.html

3) wait for traffic

4) after enough visitors have come to the funnel, pass the resulting conversion numbers through ABBA http://www.thumbtack.com/labs/abba/ [1] to see confidence intervals on our results

For further reading, I highly recommend:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/how-to-...

[1] disclaimer: my colleague wrote ABBA

Hey martian, thanks for the feedback. Your methodology is pretty sound - it looks like we use a similar technique. If you supply a small sample size here, you'll get the message, "There is not enough data to determine a conclusive result".

I also agree. This is effectively 2 lines of R code:

    binom.test(500,2100)
    binom.test(1000,2000)

With a boxplots/confidence interval plots (which are not many more lines). Whether this is useful or not depends on how much people know about statistics I guess.

This calculator makes reasonable assumptions. For example, it doesn't use bootstrapping, and it assumes a normal distribution. I don't see how making these assumptions makes the calculator bad, it just means if you are a stats person who wants to do something different, you'll need to implement your own script. Outside of the HN crowd, there are people who don't code, who nonetheless work with a/b tests, and still need a measure of statistical confidence.

Since a binomial distribution approaches a normal distribution for large N, that's a valid assumption to make.

The arguments in this thread over which is the precise distribution are over analyzing, in my opinion. If I had an experiment that gave one winner with a binomial distribution, and a different winner with the normal approximation, I'd feel little confidence in the results and want to run it again or collect more data. I don't see how that would happen though.

Bootstrapping would be better, sure, but it would be confusing for an a/b test calculator to give you different numbers each time you refresh the page.

You're free to write your own R scripts if you want to do it yourself.

I agree with martian's advice about figuring out a minimum number of visitors you expect to need before analyzing the data, or else you're at risk of biasing the experiment by declaring a winner prematurely.

The confidence region appears symmetric around the mean. This indicates they are using the normal approximation.

Exact confidence regions can be found, if you do it using Binomial instead.

The question to be asked, if m out of n is the frequency, is for which values of p do you have P(m>=M) = 0.975 and for which value of p do you have P(m<=M) = 0.975, where M ~ Binimial(n,p).

It can be solved easily too.

Hey, I'm the author of Confidence.js which was used to power this A/B testing calculator. That sounds really interesting and worth looking into - thanks for the feedback!

The normal approximation is notoriously [1][2] bad when the binomial proportion you're trying to estimate is small and you don't have a big n. If one still wants a closed-form out-of-the-box formula (to avoid the exact resolution you suggested), one can use the Wilson approximation for instance.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence_...

[2]: http://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/1009213286

Pretty animation, but I have some reservations about the maths:

- Normal approximation, as already noticed, ain't no good. Use the Wilson score instead.

- No power calculation? Type II errors are far more important IMHO in typical web applications because switching costs are small.

- non-overlapping 95% confidence interval do not imply p < 0.05. It's actually much lower than that. 83% CI is more like p of 0.05. (Errors add in quadrature.)

There is a tension between making something simple for the lay person and providing knobs for the expert to twiddle. I can see the case for removing the knobs but the choices should at least be documented.

[It's late here so this post is a bit slim on details. If you're interested sign up to http://bandits.mynaweb.com/ as the next section covers confidence intervals.]

Hey Noel,

I was in charge of the math here - I really appreciate your feedback. You seem really knowledgeable in this area and I would love to improve this A/B testing library.

If you have some time to chat, email me at jessica@sendwithus.com

Arguably the "best" confidence interval for this situation is the Blyth-Still-Casella interval (preferred by StatXact), and the "best" hypothesis test is Barnard's test.

Here is code to calculate both: https://github.com/keithw/biostat

I say "arguably" literally -- there is a huge body of literature on confidence intervals for binary proportions, much of it in disagreement about what is important. The Wilson score interval and Agresti-Caffo and whatever else are fine approximate methods that came of age when ease of calculation was a big concern. But if you have a computer and you're baking one thing into a library, may as well make it the best one you can.

Of course there is also plenty of merit to just picking some prior distribution and integrating over the conditional probability distribution given the data, aka a Bayesian approach.

In practice I don't think this (stats geekery about the merits of different confidence or credible intervals) is the most important part. The numerical results from all these techniques will be pretty similar.

The important part is in the design of the experiment, the interpretation, and playing by the rules. If you want to dynamically tune a Web site to make the most money as more information rolls in, that calls for a different experiment than a standard hypothesis test. (Even if you want to peek early at the results and possibly abort the test as a result, that calls for different tools and different rules.)

Hadn't heard of the Blyth-Still-Casella interval or Barnard's test before, so thanks for that.

By "If you want to dynamically tune a Web site to make the most money as more information rolls in, that calls for a different experiment than a standard hypothesis test." you're talking about minimising regret / bandit algorithms?

Try out http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/chi-squared.html. That's what we use at SimplePrints all the time. Great library of functions.

This methodology is flawed, because in practice the conversion rate changes over time. There are different effects that cause this temporal dependence not including the natural effect on the product of certain techniques (for example testing a very loud and painful to escape from upsell will cause some people to agree into the upsell and never see it again, and others to feel pissed off). Other causes of temporal dependence are different mix of traffic in terms of geography and demographics at different times of day and week.

Even using proper Wilson confidence intervals with good methodology with tens of millions of impressions per group, we would see day to day variations in rate outside confidence intervals of the previous day, way more frequently than one would expect (one would expect a 95% confidence interval to be exceeded once every few weeks instead of every couple of days).

The proper methodology is to estimate by bootstrapping on a good selection of dangerous variables, including time.

Sorry to be another typical HN nitpicker, but one problem I see with many of these approaches is that the significance level (95% in this case) is picked out of thin air. The reality is that even with a single data point, you have information. The information may not be reliable, but it's information nonetheless. The only reason that people don't redesign based on unreliable information is that redesigns have costs: costs for the developer and costs for the users. Given that different sites have different cost functions, they should also have different significance thresholds.

One size does not fit all.

The recommendation of 95% significance level is quite common across A/B testing resources. The main goal here is to be able to say which variant will consistently perform best (in this case, 95% of the time).

I agree that it would be useful to be able to change the confidence level based on a site's specific needs - this is a feature I am looking to implement in Confidence.js soon.

It's great!

Although most real-life cases that I'm familiar with also include an average basket, even repeated purchases. Explaining that the anecdotal big purchase on version A is actually anecdotic, and that you need to consider the distribution, escalation slope, rhythm of purchases… all that is very difficult, especially with simple tools around like this one that make it sound like such tests are actually simple and can work for any level of audience. Having a decent separation of expected LTV on a four-pronged A/B/C/D test, especially when your conversion rate is around 1% and your re-purchase well under 20%… that’s a challenge that requires millions of users for months.

http://www.experimentcalculator.com/

This is a better tool with more information provided (in an excel spreadsheet)

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ab-test...

Ok I give up even pretending to understand statistics anymore

I'm going to pick up a neglected "Think Stats" from OReilly and would appreciate anyone's feedback on Stats Moocs on coursera or similar

(I'm finding long division difficult these days)

I'm in the same boat - I've given up and leave these things to the experts :)

Well I'm not prepared to leave that much to the experts - I should at least know how to design an experiment that gets me a 95% confidence result, how to not pick if my null hypothesis is right or wrong, and at least be able to remmeber the difference in calculating permutations and combinations

It's like I know there is a castle over there and I know it has a turret, but I have never gone in. Different from not knowing what is out there at all.

I wish these things would let you change the confidence interval. 95% is really only used in an academic context. If you think about decisions that you make in a typical business context, you are not using more than 80% or so

This is a feature that I would love to add to Confidence.js sometime in the near future.

really? now we have to have an entire website dedicated to the t-test? surely this is something you could learn to do in a spreadsheet? no?

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