Claims

MAB assignment overestimates effect sizes for normally distributed rewards, with greater overestimation for smaller true effects

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2019 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2022: tool and model accuracy changes quickly
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on a source with no registered publication record (a web page, book or unpublished report). It is kept because a design page cites it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims

Reading the evidence codes

q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.

This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.

q2 i? With a true effect size of 0.2, prior-between simulations measured an average effect size of 0.30 at sample size m; a true effect of 0.8 was measured as 0.93. → Rafferty 2019

Evidence

Rafferty 2019

Rafferty, A. N., Ying, H., & Williams, J. J. (2019). Statistical Consequences of using Multi-armed Bandits to Conduct Adaptive Educational Experiments. Journal of Educational Data Mining, Volume 11, No 1. https://jedm.educationaldatamining.org/index.php/JEDM/article/view/357

q2 · i? · causal · r2

Simulation measurement of effect sizes from MAB-collected data for normally distributed rewards. The article reports "an average effect size of 0.30" for a true 0.2 and 0.93 for a true 0.8, attributing overestimation to measurement errors in condition means from adaptive assignment rather than filtering of nonsignificant runs.

"for small actual effect size of0.2, prior-between simula- tions found an average effect size of 0.30 with sample size m, while simulations with the large effect size of0.8 found average effect size0.93."

Discussion

Page metadata
Field Value
type claim
id mab-overestimates-effect-sizes
title MAB assignment overestimates effect sizes for normally distributed rewards, with greater overestimation for smaller true effects
description MAB assignment overestimates effect sizes for normally distributed rewards, with greater overestimation for smaller true effects
status review
evidence_strength moderate
newest_evidence 2019
recheck_by 2022
generated by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-09
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — rafferty-2019

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