Re:What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online expe...
by gwern on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @12:03PM
(#14604950)
Great to see a multilevel model used to shrink the effects. I was reading the abstract and thought, they probably didn't correct for sampling error - but you did.
I'm not an expert on plate notation, though, so I'm not sure which MLM you used. Is it basically `Revenue ~ (Covariate_1 + ... + Covariate_n | Treatment | Category)`?
Maybe more importantly - every A/B test ever run suffers from measurement error, and usually in e-commerce this error is on the scale of the effect you are trying to measure. This means that sometimes you will 'see' massive uplifts, where in actuality most of the size of the effect was due to random noise. This is kind of the curse of e-commerce : most people have enough data to say something (we are 95% sure this test was positive), but most not with any notable precision (we are 95% sure the uplift was between +8% and +9%). Basically all the stats in this analysis is trying to remove this noise, and this is what we got.