[netdevphoenix]

I remember during the 10s, there was this wave of frenzied almost cult-like talk of Bayes among the engineer types. Does anyone remember it? You had folks arguing Bayes was the ultimate stats tool, that it was superior to frequentist tools, etc. Some guy called Yudowsky was a heavy supporter of it too.

[yearolinuxdsktp]

Well Bayesian stats can be a superior stats tool vs frequentist for A/B testing applications, especially around digital traffic, where it builds with time and it’s different than calling up a sample size of people, and when you want to subdivide the samples, or if you want to stop testing early. These are some techniques now to end frequentist tests early in the presence of a strong signal that were developed in response to the criticisms in the 10s.

[sigwinch]

In my experience, interest from sociology promoted it to those writing A/B testing. It’s not that the difference in a degree in applied statistics and a degree in data science demonstrated frequentist versus Bayesian.