Multi-Metric Adaptive Experimental Design under Fixed Budget with Validation

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Qining, Fiez, Tanner, Liu, Yi, Liu, Wenyang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866915322127187968
author Zhang, Qining
Fiez, Tanner
Liu, Yi
Liu, Wenyang
author_facet Zhang, Qining
Fiez, Tanner
Liu, Yi
Liu, Wenyang
contents Standard A/B tests in online experiments face statistical power challenges when testing multiple candidates simultaneously, while adaptive experimental designs (AED) alone fall short in inferring experiment statistics such as the average treatment effect, especially with many metrics (e.g., revenue, safety) and heterogeneous variances. This paper proposes a fixed-budget multi-metric AED framework with a two-phase structure: an adaptive exploration phase to identify the best treatment, and a validation phase with an A/B test to verify the treatment's quality and infer statistics. We propose SHRVar, which generalizes sequential halving (SH) (Karnin et al., 2013) with a novel relative-variance-based sampling and an elimination strategy built on reward z-values. It achieves a provable error probability that decreases exponentially, where the exponent generalizes the complexity measure for SH (Karnin et al., 2013) and SHVar (Lalitha et al., 2023) with homogeneous and heterogeneous variances, respectively. Numerical experiments verify our analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of this new framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03062
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Metric Adaptive Experimental Design under Fixed Budget with Validation
Zhang, Qining
Fiez, Tanner
Liu, Yi
Liu, Wenyang
Machine Learning
Standard A/B tests in online experiments face statistical power challenges when testing multiple candidates simultaneously, while adaptive experimental designs (AED) alone fall short in inferring experiment statistics such as the average treatment effect, especially with many metrics (e.g., revenue, safety) and heterogeneous variances. This paper proposes a fixed-budget multi-metric AED framework with a two-phase structure: an adaptive exploration phase to identify the best treatment, and a validation phase with an A/B test to verify the treatment's quality and infer statistics. We propose SHRVar, which generalizes sequential halving (SH) (Karnin et al., 2013) with a novel relative-variance-based sampling and an elimination strategy built on reward z-values. It achieves a provable error probability that decreases exponentially, where the exponent generalizes the complexity measure for SH (Karnin et al., 2013) and SHVar (Lalitha et al., 2023) with homogeneous and heterogeneous variances, respectively. Numerical experiments verify our analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of this new framework.
title Multi-Metric Adaptive Experimental Design under Fixed Budget with Validation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03062