Molly Offer-Westort (Workshop in Applied Statistics)

Today's Speaker

Molly Offer-Westort (UChicago), "Adaptive experimental designs for policy learning and evaluation, with applications to Facebook Messenger studies"

Abstract

When running multi-arm trials, experimenters may wish to both learn and evaluate data-driven policies; for example, learning which version of treatment is most effective and evaluating the effect of that treatment in comparison to a control condition. Response adaptive algorithms, which dynamically update treatment assignment mechanisms based on observed response, facilitate experimental designs where the most data is collected about the most effective interventions, and can improve policy learning over conventional randomized trials. I discuss design decisions when running adaptive experiments, and considerations for inference when using adaptively collected data. I review applications to Facebook Messenger studies using different adaptive algorithms. 

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.

More information is available at the Gov 3009 website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009

All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.