Hi all,

Last week we discussed our approach to A/B testing and we've decided to have a week (at least) between tests.

A two-week-minimum cadence will give the analysis team enough time to thoroughly think about the experimental design of each test, as well as give the engineers enough time to implement it. Which is great because some of the changes we are planning to test are not trivial and we don't want to rush a test out and realize halfway through that we should have been tracking something we're not.

We are also going to move away from doing initial analyses (analysis of the data from the morning of a launch) for practical and scientific reasons. Practical in the sense that we've been putting time and effort into getting preliminary results that are not representative of final results whatsoever while putting other work on the backburner. Scientific in the sense that peeking at the data mid-experiment is bad science:

Repeated significance testing always increases the rate of false positives, that is, you’ll think many insignificant results are significant (but not the other way around). The problem will be present if you ever find yourself “peeking” at the data and stopping an experiment that seems to be giving a significant result. The more you peek, the more your significance levels will be off. For example, if you peek at an ongoing experiment ten times, then what you think is 1% significance is actually just 5% significance. – Evan Miller, How Not To Run An A/B Test

In science, it's a problem called multiple comparisons. The more tests you perform, the more likely you are to see something where there is nothing. Going forward, we are going to wait until we have collected all the data before analyzing it.

Cheers,

Mikhail, Junior Swifty

Discovery // The Swifties

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