A Methodology for Discovering how to Adaptively Personalize to Users using Experimental Comparisons
This addresses the challenge of effectively personalizing technology for users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts like A/B testing and modular design.
The paper tackles the problem of discovering how to adaptively personalize technology by proposing a formalism that combines randomized experiments with user models, showing equivalence between experimentation and personalization to enable dynamic, real-time improvements.
We explain and provide examples of a formalism that supports the methodology of discovering how to adapt and personalize technology by combining randomized experiments with variables associated with user models. We characterize a formal relationship between the use of technology to conduct A/B experiments and use of technology for adaptive personalization. The MOOClet Formalism [11] captures the equivalence between experimentation and personalization in its conceptualization of modular components of a technology. This motivates a unified software design pattern that enables technology components that can be compared in an experiment to also be adapted based on contextual data, or personalized based on user characteristics. With the aid of a concrete use case, we illustrate the potential of the MOOClet formalism for a methodology that uses randomized experiments of alternative micro-designs to discover how to adapt technology based on user characteristics, and then dynamically implements these personalized improvements in real time.