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20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

stevehanov.ca

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Re: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

#4

Post by aub3bhat »

"Like many techniques in machine learning, the simplest strategy is hard to beat." is a thoroughly ridiculous statement.

It should instead say "Like many techniques in machine learning, the simplest strategy is easiest to implement" as the title of the post (20 lines) makes it clear.

Re: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

#6

Post by kqr »

thecopy wrote: post #5

Offtopic, but why do i have to enable Javascript to even see anything?

That is really weird. Technically the content is there all along (so it's not loaded in by JavaScript) but you still have to have JavaScript enabled for it to render. Who designed that!?

Edit: hahaha what. It appears the content is laid out with JavaScript. So basically they're using JavaScript as a more dynamic CSS. Let that sink in. They're using JavaScript as CSS.

It sorta-kinda makes sense for the fancy stream of comments but still... why is it a requirement!?

Re: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

#7

Post by ReadingInBed »

I thought this was a pretty good follow up to show the strengths and weaknesses of this approach: https://vwo.com/blog/multi-armed-bandit-algorithm/. Personally I think this approach makes a lot more sense than a/b testing especially when often people hand off the methodology to a 3rd party without knowing exactly how they work.

Re: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

#8

Post by saturdayplace »

So I googled A/B testing vs Multi-Armed Bandit, and ran into an article that's a useful and informative response to the OP: https://vwo.com/blog/multi-armed-bandit-algorithm/

edit: Ah, 'ReadingInBed beat me to it. tl;dr: Bandit approaches might not _always_ be the best, and they tend to take longer to reach a statistically significant result.

Re: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

#9

Post by pdkl95 »

kqr wrote: post #6
thecopy wrote: post #5

Offtopic, but why do i have to enable Javascript to even see anything?

That is really weird. Technically the content is there all along (so it's not loaded in by JavaScript) but you still have to have JavaScript enabled for it to render. Who designed that!? Edit: hahaha what. It appears the content is laid out with JavaScript. So basically they're using JavaScript as a more dynamic CSS. Let that sink in. They're using JavaScript as CSS. It sorta-kinda makes sense for the fancy stream of…

Apparently some sort of useless fade-in effect is more important than the page content. This is the fix:

    #main {
        visibility: visible !important;
    }

Re: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

#10

Post by pmontra »

kqr wrote: post #6
thecopy wrote: post #5

Offtopic, but why do i have to enable Javascript to even see anything?

That is really weird. Technically the content is there all along (so it's not loaded in by JavaScript) but you still have to have JavaScript enabled for it to render. Who designed that!? Edit: hahaha what. It appears the content is laid out with JavaScript. So basically they're using JavaScript as a more dynamic CSS. Let that sink in. They're using JavaScript as CSS. It sorta-kinda makes sense for the fancy stream of…

Very funny. They have a div #main with visibility:hidden. Removing that rule from dev tools displays the full page without enabling JS. The comments block is a solved problem with CSS. Basically any grid layout toolkit does that as their very first demo.
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