Generalized Sequential Probability Ratio Test for Families of Hypotheses [pdf]
33 points by luu 5 days ago | 6 comments

noelwelsh 2 days ago
From 2014, with 43 cites in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4354840623154369813...

Might want to check the cites for more recent work ("Efficiency in sequential testing" looks relevant) and also the literature on "bandit best arm identification", which seems to be distinct from this line of work but tackles broadly the same problem.

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measurablefunc 2 days ago
Great. How do I use this in my life to make things better?
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glial 2 days ago
The SPRT is probably already making your life better: it's used to decrease the cost of medical trails, optimize classifications in high-stakes examinations (i.e. for medical certifications), detect defective manufacturing processes, etc. It sounds like this paper extends the method to groups of hypotheses, whereas the basic version is limited to a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis.
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data-ottawa 2 days ago
This helps with determining when have you observed enough data to make a decision.

A/B tests, monitoring metrics, health, quality control all use this.

If you use LLMs, you might use this to determine if a model update or prompt change impacts results using fewer tokens.

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srean 15 hours ago
You can search for the "peeking" problem in A/B testing.

SPRT also very likely helped win a major war that involved many nations.

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wdkrnls 24 hours ago
Implement a statistical software suite that ubiquitously uses this framework instead of the usual hierarchical mixed modeling tools whose assumptions often don't match what experiments were actually done.
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