Comment by jvans
5 days ago
Imagine a scenario where option B does 10x better than option A during the morning hours but -2x worse the rest of the day. If you start the multi armed bandit in the morning it could converge to option B quickly and dominate the rest of the day even though it performs worse then.
Or in the above scenario option B performs a lot better than option A but only with the sale going, otherwise option B performs worse.
One of the problems we caught only once or twice: mobile versus desktop shifting with time of day, and what works on mobile may work worse than on desktop.
We weren’t at the level of hacking our users, just looking at changes that affect response time and resource utilizations, and figuring out why a change actually seems to have made things worse instead of better. It’s easy for people to misread graphs. Especially if the graphs are using Lying with Statistics anti patterns.