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A Comparison of Methods for Adaptive Experimentation

Samantha Horn, Sabina J. Sloman

arXiv 1 Jul 2022 · Statistics — Methodology

arXiv:2207.00683 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We use a simulation study to compare three methods for adaptive experimentation: Thompson sampling, Tempered Thompson sampling, and Exploration sampling. We gauge the performance of each in terms of social welfare and estimation accuracy, and as a function of the number of experimental waves. We further construct a set of novel "hybrid" loss measures to identify which methods are optimal for researchers pursuing a combination of experimental aims. Our main results are: 1) the relative performance of Thompson sampling depends on the number of experimental waves, 2) Tempered Thompson sampling uniquely distributes losses across multiple experimental aims, and 3) in most cases, Exploration sampling performs similarly to random assignment.

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Stefano Caria, Maximilian Kasy, Simon Quinn, Soha Shami, Alex Teytel… (2020) An adaptive targeted field experiment: Job search assistance for refugees in jordan0.84333100%
2Maximilian Kasy and Anja Sautmann (2021) Adaptive treatment assignment in experiments for policy choice0.84333100%
3William R Thompson (1933) On the likelihood that one unknown probability exceeds another in view of the evidence of two samples0.64422100%
4Chris Kaibel and Torsten Biemann (2021) Rethinking the gold standard with multi-armed bandits: Machine learning allocation algorithms for experiments0.40511100%
5Jianchang Lin and Veronica Bunn (2017) Comparison of multi-arm multi-stage design and adaptive randomization in platform clinical trials0.40511100%
6Elizabeth G Ryan, Sarah E Lamb, Esther Williamson, and Simon Gates (2020) Bayesian adaptive designs for multi-arm trials: an orthopaedic case study0.40511100%
7Lorenzo Trippa, Eudocia Q Lee, Patrick Y Wen, Tracy T Batchelor, Tim… (2012) Bayesian adaptive randomized trial design for patients with recurrent glioblastoma0.40511100%
8Kert Viele, Kristine Broglio, Anna McGlothlin, and Benjamin R Saville (2020) Comparison of methods for control allocation in multiple arm studies using response adaptive randomization0.40511100%
9James MS Wason and Lorenzo Trippa (2014) A comparison of bayesian adaptive randomization and multi-stage designs for multi-arm clinical trials0.40511100%
10J Kyle Wathen and Peter F Thall (2017) A simulation study of outcome adaptive randomization in multi-arm clinical trials0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 10 scored citations.