# ABBA

## A/B testing statistics

Label Number of successes Number of trials
Remove
• Interval confidence level:
• Use multiple testing correction:

### What is Abba?

Abba helps you interpret the results of binomial experiments. In this kind of experiment, you run a number of trials, each of which ends in either a "successful" outcome or a "failure" outcome. Trials are divided into two or more groups, and the goal of the experiment is to draw conclusions about how the chance of success differs between those groups. This usually boils down to determining if the success rate is higher for one group than for another.

In the world of consumer web, some common examples of binomial experiments would be:

• Testing variations of a signup form against the exsting form to see if either one increases the signup rate.
• Testing copy variations in a marketing email or a search ad to see if one of them increases clickthrough rate.
• Testing various pricing options for a product to determine how price affects purchase rate.

In all of these examples, the groups are the different variations, and the "successful" outcome is the one where the user completes the desirable action: signing up, clicking through, or purchasing.

Abba handles binomial experiments with any number of groups. One group is always designated as the baseline and all other groups are compared against it.

Abba was motivated by the experiments we run daily to make data-informed product decisions here at Thumbtack (shameless plug: we're hiring!). Abba's interface was inspired by Google's excellent Website Optimizer tool.

### Why is Abba useful?

The main reason to use Abba is to avoid drawing conclusions based on observed anomalies that were actually due to chance. If we were to simply compare the observed success rates of each group, we'd have no way to know whether a group is truly better (and can be expected to perform better in the future) or whether the results were just a fluke. All real-world experiments are subject to some degree of unavoidable random variation — Abba helps quantify how confident we can be that our conclusions reflect genuine differences between groups.

Also keep in mind that random variation is only one source of error in experiments. External factors such as time or geography can also lead to misleading results. For example, suppose you run a baseline signup form on a Monday and a new variation the next day, and the variation gets substantially more signups. Is the new form truly better, in that we can expect it to perform better over the long run? Or are people just more inclined to sign up on Tuesdays? Or did people just sign up more on that particular Tuesday because the weather was nice?

The best way to avoid external sources of error is to run all groups over exactly the same time period and on exactly the same target population, and to randomize trials into the different groups. This means, for instance, that you should not compare results for new variations to prior results for the baseline — you should only compare groups that were run together in the same experiment.

And remember: if you reach conclusions that seem too good/bad to be true, they probably are! Always consider external sources of error before drawing conclusions.

### What do the results mean?

Abba computes a few useful results:

• The estimated success rate along with a confidence interval, which gives an idea of how precisely we know the "true" success rate based on the observed data.
• A p-value which gives an idea of how confident we are that the two groups truly have different chances of success. The lower the p-value, the more confident we are that the given group is actually different from the baseline. 5% and 1% are the most common thresholds used to declare "statistical significance", but I encourage you to read below for more details. Note that the p-value says nothing about the magnitude of the difference between success rates, which is often of greater importance. This is why we also compute...
• The estimated improvement in success rate as a percentage relative to the baseline success rate. This value also includes a confidence interval which gives an idea of how much practically better or worse a variation might be compared to the baseline.

As you may have noticed, Abba updates the URL fragment for each report you generate, so you can easily share reports by copying the URL and sending it to your friends, coworkers, Twitter followers, blog readers, or maybe just Mom.

### How does the code work?

abba/stats.js implements all of the statistics (detailed below). It relies on the jStat library for approximations to normal and binomial distribution functions.

abba/render.js displays the test results given trial and success counts for each group. It can be reused in your own applications — the Abba class provides a friendly interface, e.g.,

abba = new Abba('Existing version', 20, 100);
abba.renderTo(\$('#results'));

render.js isolates the DOM manipulation code in view classes so that the rest of the logic (in ResultsPresenter) can be easily tested. We use Protovis to render the visual confidence intervals.

The rest of the demo app is implemented in demo/app.js as both a useful tool and an example of how you might use Abba as a library yourself. It uses js-hash for history handling.

All three modules are unit tested using Jasmine, and of course we rely on the wonderful jQuery.

You can find all of the source in our github repo.

### What's a p-value?

Suppose we run an experiment with two versions of a signup form, in which 100 (randomly chosen) users see an experimental form B and the remaining users see the existing form A. Suppose more users sign up with form B than with form A. We'd like to conclude that we've found a real improvement: form B actually has a higher "true" signup rate. Unfortunately, there's another possible explanation: that both forms have the same "true" signup rate, but form B "got lucky" and had more signups just by random chance.

The p-value helps quantify our confidence that form B really is better and didn't just "get lucky". If we assume the two forms actually do have the same signup rate, the p-value is the probability of observing a discrepancy as large as the one we actually saw. A p-value of 1% means that if the two forms really are the same, then we just happened to get a one in 100 outcome. That's pretty unlikely, and in most cases we'd be willing to accept that form B really is better. With a p-value of 25%, on the other hand, the observed discrepancy isn't all that unlikely even if the two forms have exactly the same signup rate. We can't conclude that they acutally do have the same signup rate — all we know is that we can't conclude they're different (and that we need more data to have any confidence in such a conclusion).

It turns out there's another interpretation for the p-value. Suppose we accept any result with a p-value below 5%. Then if we run many such tests where the two forms actually are the same, we'd expect about 5% of cases to generate a discrepency large enough for us to accept, just by chance. So the p-value can be thought of as the chance of accepting a false positive over many such experiments.

As noted above, the p-value says nothing about the magnitude of the difference between the two forms. The p-value is only distinguishing between "they're the same" and "they're different", but "they're different" may mean "they're different by 0.001%". If you have a billion users try each form, you'll probably get a tiny p-value, but that doesn't mean that the difference is meaningful to your business. The relative improvement confidence interval tends to be much more useful for making practical decisions.

That said, the usual question about p-values is how low does it have to be? The answer, of course, is it depends. If you're a startup testing small copy changes on a page, maybe a p-value of 10% is fine — better to move quickly and be wrong 10% of the time. On the other hand, if you're testing a prototype of a page that will take months to fully implement, maybe you want to wait for a p-value of 1% or 0.1% before investing serious resources in the implementation. Unfortunately, the only universal rule is that you have to use that squishy thing between your ears.

### What exactly do the confidence intervals mean?

The goal of any experiment is to estimate some "true" information about the real world given a limited amount of observed data. In the case of Abba, we want to estimate the success rate of each group and the improvement of each group over the baseline. We obviously don't expect these estimates to be exactly correct, but we do expect them to get more accurate when we have more data.

A confidence interval is an attempt to quantify this effect. Roughly, it can be thought of as a range of values that we can be reasonably confident includes the "true" value. These are useful because they give more practical information than a p-value and generally often more information than a p-value.

For example, a low p-value may tell us that a variation is confidently better than the baseline, but the confidence interval on relative improvement could tell us that it's confidently at least 10% better than the baseline, or perhaps no more than 10% better, in which case we may choose to ignore the results anyway. On the flip side, a high p-value may show that we need more data to conclude a variation is better than the baseline, but the relative improvement confidence interval may tell us that we can confidently expect no more than a 20% improvement. If that's too small an improvement, we may choose to abandon the test and explore other ideas rather than wait for more data to achieve a lower p-value. We can never conclude that two variations have exactly the same success rate, but the relative improvement confidence interval can give us bounds on how close they (probably) are. (Drawing such conclusions does tend to require large sample sizes.)

More precisely, a 95% confidence interval means that if we were to run many such experiments under the same conditions, about 95% of the time the confidence interval we got would include the "true" value. If this sounds remniscent of p-values, that's because the two are closely related. When the 95% confidence interval on relative improvement has one of its limits at 0%, the p-value will equal 5%. (This isn't exactly true in Abba because the p-value and the confidence interval are computed in slightly different ways, but it should be nearly true in most cases.)

The relative improvement confidence intervals in Abba can generally be taken as having 95% confidence level. This is a safe interpretation but isn't exactly true because the confidence level is adjusted to account for multiple testing. The confidence intervals on success rates are computed at a lower confidence level so that they "line up" more nicely with the relative improvement interval and the p-value. You can find more details below.

### Why is the success rate wrong?

It may seem strange that the estimated success rate is not simply the number of successes divided by the total number of trials. For small samples or small success rates, the discrepancy can be substantial.

Suppose I flipped a coin once, got tails, and asked you to estimate the probability that this coin lands heads up. You probably wouldn't give me 0% as your best estimate. If I got five tails in a row, you probably still wouldn't give me 0% as your best estimate, although you'd certainly estimate something closer to zero. In much the same way, we "smooth" the estimated success rate towards 50% in such a way that results for small samples or small success rates are less misleading (and the generated confidence intervals, symmetric around the estimated value, are much higher quality).

For large samples, this effect will usually be unnoticeable. And even for small samples, the p-value and relative improvement confidence interval tend to be the more important values to consider. If you need to use the success rate for small samples, you can choose whether you want to use Abba's "smoothed" value or simple division based on your own knowledge of the problem.

### Why do all of the results change when I add a trial?

As explained above, Abba guards against results that are due purely to chance. In an experiment where we test many groups against a single baseline, we're effectively running many experiments at once. If we rely on the usual p-values and confidence intervals, we're fooling ourselves into a false sense of security. The usual values limit the risk of a false positive result for each individual group, but the risk of at least one false positive from any group is larger. The more groups we test against the baseline, the larger this risk grows.

To avoid this problem, the p-values and confidence intervals are automatically adjusted based on the number of groups being compared to the baseline. The adjustment is such that the confidence level of any conclusions drawn applies across all of the groups present. More groups means higher p-values and wider confidence intervals. You can find more precise details below.

### What are the underlying statistics?

The estimated success rate and confidence interval are computed using the Agresti-Coull interval (also called the adjusted Wald interval). The confidence interval on relative improvement is computed by treating the success rates are normal random variables (in line with the assumptions of the Agresti-Coull interval). The absolute improvement is then the difference of two normal random variables, so that if the two success rates are $$S_1 \sim N(p_1, \sigma_1)$$ and $$S_2 \sim N(p_2, \sigma_2)$$, then $S_2 - S_1 \sim N \left( p_2 - p_1, \sqrt{\sigma_1^2 + \sigma_2^2} \right)$ The relative improvement simply divides all values by the estimated baseline success rate.

The confidence level for the relative improvement starts with a base confidence level $$1 - \alpha_\text{base}$$ which is always 95% in this application. This is adjusted for multiple testing using the simple Bonferroni correction: $\alpha_\text{improvement} = \frac{\alpha_\text{base}}{N}$ for $$N$$ tests. The confidence interval is made smaller for individual success rates by adjusting the Z critical value: $z_\text{success rate} = \frac{z_\text{improvement}}{\sqrt{2}}$ This is chosen so that the success rate confidence intervals correspond directly to the improvement confidence interval, based on the formula above for computing the improvement. If the two success rate intervals just touch at their bounds, then the improvement interval will be bounded at zero.

To compute the p-value, we use the difference of observed proportions $$p_2 - p_1$$ as the test stastic and test the null hypothesis $$H_0: p_1 = p_2$$ against the alternative $$H_1: p_1 \neq p_2$$. Note that we're using the observed proportion directly here, not the estimated success rate described above. We always compute a two-sided p-value, and we rely on the pooled proportion as in a pooled Z-test.

To account for multiple testing on an individual basis, if we have $$N$$ groups to test against the baseline, we pretend all $$N$$ groups have the same data and compute the probability that any group's test statistic is at least as extreme as the observed value. This isn't entirely straightforward to compute. We could rely on Boole's inequality and use $$Np$$, but this is far too conservative to be practical. If we treat the tests as independent we could use $p_\text{multiple tests} = 1 - \left( 1 - p_\text{single test} \right)^N,$ but because all of the tests share a single baseline group, they're not independent. In fact, in the case of two groups, the test statistics are jointly normal with positive covariance equal to the variance of the baseline success rate, $$p_\text{pooled} (1 - p_\text{pooled}) / n_\text{baseline trials}$$(this probably generalizes to any number of groups, but I don't have the chops to prove it). Unfortunately, I know of no good way to compute approximations of the multivariate normal CDF, which is what we'd need to do if we wanted to use this fact to compute p-values.

To get around that problem, we condition on the baseline success count $$B$$. In that situation (and treating total trial counts as nonrandom for all groups), the tests are independent and we can rely on the above formula to get an exact conditional value. We can then use the law of total probability to find the total p-value, $p_\text{multiple tests} = \sum_{i=0}^{n_b} \Bigl( 1 - \bigl( 1 - p_{\text{single test} | B=i} \bigr)^N \Bigr) \mathbb{P}(B=i),$ where $$n_b$$ is the number of trials in the baseline group.

This scales like $$O(n_b)$$ and can get very slow, so in practice we only iterate over a $$1 - \alpha$$ confidence interval for $$B$$ and then add $$\alpha$$ to the final result to get a conservative estimate (since $$\alpha$$ is the total excluded baseline probability mass, the excluded values can contribute no more than that to the final p-value). This scales like $$O(\sqrt{n_b})$$ and seems to be plenty quick in practice, and Abba currently uses $$\alpha = 10^{-5}$$ so the precision is more than good enough.

To compute the conditional p-values, we find the upper and lower success counts for the variation group that would produce just as large of a difference in success rate as that observed, given the (conditional) baseline count. We then compute the tail probabilities using the (binomial) distribution of the variation group's success count (again, relying on the pooled proportion). For small sample sizes (up to 100 trials) we compute the binomial CDF directly; for larger samples we use the normal approximation.