AB Testing as Building Block to AI
To make sure we are all on the same page, lets start with something we are already familiar with from optimization, AB Testing. AB Testing is often used as a way to decide which is the best experience to present to your customers so that they have the highest probability to achieve a particular objective. In order to smooth the transition from AB testing to thinking about RL, it’s going to be helpful to think about AB testing as having the following elements:
- A touch-point – the place, or state, where we need to make the decision, for example on a web page;
- A decision – this is the set of possible competing experiences to present to the customer (the ‘A’ and ‘B’ in AB Testing); and
- A payoff or objective – this is our goal, or reward, it is often an action we would like the customer to take (buy a product, sign-up etc.)
Read the rest of this post by Matt Gershoff here: Going from AB Testing to AI: Optimization as Reinforcement Learning
