Engineering Blog

Posts for July 2014

Introducing MOE: Metric Optimization Engine; a new open source, machine learning service for optimal experiment design

At Yelp we run a lot of A/B tests. By constantly trying new features and testing their impact, we are able to continue evolving our products and make them as useful as possible. However, running online A/B tests can be expensive (in opportunity cost, user experience, or revenue) and time consuming (to achieve statistical significance). Furthermore, many A/B tests boil down to parameter selection (more of an A/A’ test, where a feature stays the same, and only the parameters change). Given a feature, we want to find the optimal configuration values for the constants and hyperparameters of the feature as...

Continue reading