Reinforcement Learning for A/B Testing Platform

Summary

• Deciding on which game updates take priority should be a data-driven decision. The impact of any change on the user activity and game revenue are often measured through A/B testing.
• A large gaming company requested a self-learning platform which automatically creates and launches hundreds of A/B testing campaigns, learns and iterates over the resulting statistics to reach an arbitrary set of campaign goals.

Tech Challenge

• When tested product goes through various stages of its life-cycle, goals might swap priorities.
• Most of the tests are created manually and managed by humans, with only few parameters changed at once not to introduce over-complexity into results’ interpretation.
• Different parameters, competing goals, lots of statistical events are the factors that introduce additional complexity and need automatic insights extraction.
• Finding complex interaction between the entire list of A/B parameters and real-world state is extremely technically challenging.

Solution

• Our team used recently introduced techniques from reinforcement and deep learning to model complex parameters interaction, time dependent external state and A/B campaign events stream.
• As a result, we have developed a self-learning solution which, firstly, pre-trains itself using historical data and then takes control over the campaigns. Product owner remains in control of goals and parameters.
• System creates hundreds of micro-campaigns with different goals and fast-checks hypotheses on a user base sample. Then, it explores the resulting space with deeper tests to maximize the outcomes in each cycle.
• Campaign results are integrated back via learning process and checked against updated goals; the cycle repeats.
• AI explores sophisticated dependencies in parameters/state spaces and their relations with the list of goals, provides opportunities beyond conventional approach to A/B testing, while the rest is controlled by product owner in an intuitive way.

Impact

• First, we tested, validated and then applied the approach to the mobile game application.
• Then we have compared our solution to Bayesian optimization reference and found that our reinforcement learning solution shows superior results to Bayesian baseline.
• Furthermore, the self-learning solution is adaptable to completely different cases with relative ease.
• Full results presentation is available upon request.