PlanAlyzer

We did not expect to see any real causal sufficiency errors due to the expert nature of the authors of PLANOUT-A. Rather, we expect to see some false positives due to the fact that PLANALYZER is aggressive about flagging potential causal sufficiency errors. We made this design choice because the cost of unrecorded confounders can be very high. PLANOUT scripts in deployment at Facebook represent a range of experimental designs. We observed factorial designs, conditional assignment, within-subjects experiments, cluster random assignment, and bandits experiments in the scripts we examined. Real-world PLANOUT scripts unsurprisingly contained few errors, because they were primarily written and overseen by experts in experimental design. Therefore, to test how well PLANALYZER finds errors, we selected a subset of fifty scripts from PLANOUT-A and mutated them. We then validated a subset of the contrasts PLANALYZER produced against a corpus of hand-selected contrasts monitored and compared by an automated tool used at Facebook. Finally, we reported on PLANALYZER'S performance, because its effectiveness requires accurately identifying meaningful contrasts within a reasonable amount of time.