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Showing posts from October, 2015

Data scientist as scientist

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by NIALL CARDIN, OMKAR MURALIDHARAN, and AMIR NAJMI When working with complex systems or phenomena, the data scientist must often operate with incomplete and provisional understanding, even as she works to advance the state of knowledge. This is very much what scientists do. Our post describes how we arrived at recent changes to design principles for the Google search page, and thus highlights aspects of a data scientist’s role which involve practicing the scientific method. There has been debate as to whether the term “data science” is necessary. Some don’t see the point. Others argue that attaching the “science” is clear indication of a “wannabe” (think physics, chemistry, biology as opposed to computer science, social science and even creation science ). We’re not going to engage in this debate but in this blog post we do focus on science. Not science pertaining to a presumed discipline of data science but rather science of the domain within which a data scientist operates.

Experiment design and modeling for long-term studies in ads

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by HENNING HOHNHOLD, DEIRDRE O'BRIEN, and DIANE TANG In this post we discuss the challenges in measuring and modeling the long-term effect of ads on user behavior. We describe experiment designs which have proven effective for us and discuss the subtleties of trying to generalize the results via modeling. A/B testing is used widely in information technology companies to guide product development and improvements. For questions as disparate as website design and UI, prediction algorithms, or user flows within apps, live traffic tests help developers understand what works well for users and the business, and what doesn’t.  Nevertheless, A/B testing has challenges and blind spots, such as: the difficulty of identifying suitable metrics that give "works well" a measurable meaning. This is essentially the same as finding a truly useful objective to optimize. capturing long-term user behavior  changes that develop over time periods exceeding the typical durat