Algorithms to Live By

by Brian Christian

  Regret is the result of comparing what we actually did with what would have been best in hindsight. In a multi-armed bandit, Barnard’s “inestimable loss” can in fact be measured precisely, and regret assigned a number: it’s the difference between the total payoff obtained by following a particular strategy and the total payoff that theoretically could have been obtained by just pulling the best arm every single time (had we only known from the start which one it was). We can calculate this number for different strategies, and search for those that minimize it.

  In 1985, Herbert Robbins took a second shot at the multi-armed bandit problem, some thirty years after his initial work on Win-Stay, Lose-Shift. He and fellow Columbia mathematician Tze Leung Lai were able to prove several key points about regret. First, assuming you’re not omniscient, your total amount of regret will probably never stop increasing, even if you pick the best possible strategy—because even the best strategy isn’t perfect every time. Second, regret will increase at a slower rate if you pick the best strategy than if you pick others; what’s more, with a good strategy regret’s rate of growth will go down over time, as you learn more about the problem and are able to make better choices. Third, and most specifically, the minimum possible regret—again assuming non-omniscience—is regret that increases at a logarithmic rate with every pull of the handle.

  Logarithmically increasing regret means that we’ll make as many mistakes in our first ten pulls as in the following ninety, and as many in our first year as in the rest of the decade combined. (The first decade’s mistakes, in turn, are as many as we’ll make for the rest of the century.) That’s some measure of consolation. In general we can’t realistically expect someday to never have any more regrets. But if we’re following a regret-minimizing algorithm, every year we can expect to have fewer new regrets than we did the year before.

  Starting with Lai and Robbins, researchers in recent decades have set about looking for algorithms that offer the guarantee of minimal regret. Of the ones they’ve discovered, the most popular are known as Upper Confidence Bound algorithms.

  Visual displays of statistics often include so-called error bars that extend above and below any data point, indicating uncertainty in the measurement; the error bars show the range of plausible values that the quantity being measured could actually have. This range is known as the “confidence interval,” and as we gain more data about something the confidence interval will shrink, reflecting an increasingly accurate assessment. (For instance, a slot machine that has paid out once out of two pulls will have a wider confidence interval, though the same expected value, as a machine that has paid out five times on ten pulls.) In a multi-armed bandit problem, an Upper Confidence Bound algorithm says, quite simply, to pick the option for which the top of the confidence interval is highest.

  Like the Gittins index, therefore, Upper Confidence Bound algorithms assign a single number to each arm of the multi-armed bandit. And that number is set to the highest value that the arm could reasonably have, based on the information available so far. So an Upper Confidence Bound algorithm doesn’t care which arm has performed best so far; instead, it chooses the arm that could reasonably perform best in the future. If you have never been to a restaurant before, for example, then for all you know it could be great. Even if you have gone there once or twice, and tried a couple of their dishes, you might not have enough information to rule out the possibility that it could yet prove better than your regular favorite. Like the Gittins index, the Upper Confidence Bound is always greater than the expected value, but by less and less as we gain more experience with a particular option. (A restaurant with a single mediocre review still retains a potential for greatness that’s absent in a restaurant with hundreds of such reviews.) The recommendations given by Upper Confidence Bound algorithms will be similar to those provided by the Gittins index, but they are significantly easier to compute, and they don’t require the assumption of geometric discounting.

  Upper Confidence Bound algorithms implement a principle that has been dubbed “optimism in the face of uncertainty.” Optimism, they show, can be perfectly rational. By focusing on the best that an option could be, given the evidence obtained so far, these algorithms give a boost to possibilities we know less about. As a consequence, they naturally inject a dose of exploration into the decision-making process, leaping at new options with enthusiasm because any one of them could be the next big thing. The same principle has been used, for instance, by MIT’s Leslie Kaelbling, who builds “optimistic robots” that explore the space around them by boosting the value of uncharted terrain. And it clearly has implications for human lives as well.

  The success of Upper Confidence Bound algorithms offers a formal justification for the benefit of the doubt. Following the advice of these algorithms, you should be excited to meet new people and try new things—to assume the best about them, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.

  Bandits Online

  In 2007, Google product manager Dan Siroker took a leave of absence to join the presidential campaign of then senator Barack Obama in Chicago. Heading the “New Media Analytics” team, Siroker brought one of Google’s web practices to bear on the campaign’s bright-red DONATE button. The result was nothing short of astonishing: $57 million of additional donations were raised as a direct result of his work.

  What exactly did he do to that button?

  He A/B tested it.

  A/B testing works as follows: a company drafts several different versions of a particular webpage. Perhaps they try different colors or images, or different headlines for a news article, or different arrangements of items on the screen. Then they randomly assign incoming users to these various pages, usually in equal numbers. One user may see a red button, while another user may see a blue one; one may see DONATE and another may see CONTRIBUTE. The relevant metrics (e.g., click-through rate or average revenue per visitor) are then monitored. After a period of time, if statistically significant effects are observed, the “winning” version is typically locked into place—or becomes the control for another round of experiments.

  In the case of Obama’s donation page, Siroker’s A/B tests were revealing. For first-time visitors to the campaign site, a DONATE AND GET A GIFT button turned out to be the best performer, even after the cost of sending the gifts was taken into account. For longtime newsletter subscribers who had never given money, PLEASE DONATE worked the best, perhaps appealing to their guilt. For visitors who had already donated in the past, CONTRIBUTE worked best at securing follow-up donations—the logic being perhaps that the person had already “donated” but could always “contribute” more. And in all cases, to the astonishment of the campaign team, a simple black-and-white photo of the Obama family outperformed any other photo or video the team could come up with. The net effect of all these independent optimizations was gigantic.

  If you’ve used the Internet basically at all over the past decade, then you’ve been a part of someone else’s explore/exploit problem. Companies want to discover the things that make them the most money while simultaneously making as much of it as they can—explore, exploit. Big tech firms such as Amazon and Google began carrying out live A/B tests on their users starting in about 2000, and over the following years the Internet has become the world’s largest controlled experiment. What are these companies exploring and exploiting? In a word, you: whatever it is that makes you move your mouse and open your wallet.

  Companies A/B test their site navigation, the subject lines and timing of their marketing emails, and sometimes even their actual features and pricing. Instead of “the” Google search algorithm and “the” Amazon checkout flow, there are now untold and unfathomably subtle permutations. (Google infamously tested forty-one shades of blue for one of its toolbars in 2009.) In some cases, it’s unlikely that any pair of users will have the exact same experience.

  Data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher, former manager of the Data group at Fac
ebook, once told Bloomberg Businessweek that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” Consider it the millennials’ Howl—what Allen Ginsberg’s immortal “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” was to the Beat Generation. Hammerbacher’s take on the situation was that this state of affairs “sucks.” But regardless of what one makes of it, the web is allowing for an experimental science of the click the likes of which had never even been dreamed of by marketers of the past.

  We know what happened to Obama in the 2008 election, of course. But what happened to his director of analytics, Dan Siroker? After the inauguration, Siroker returned west, to California, and with fellow Googler Pete Koomen co-founded the website optimization firm Optimizely. By the 2012 presidential election cycle, their company counted among its clients both the Obama re-election campaign and the campaign of Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

  Within a decade or so after its first tentative use, A/B testing was no longer a secret weapon. It has become such a deeply embedded part of how business and politics are conducted online as to be effectively taken for granted. The next time you open your browser, you can be sure that the colors, images, text, perhaps even the prices you see—and certainly the ads—have come from an explore/exploit algorithm, tuning itself to your clicks. In this particular multi-armed bandit problem, you’re not the gambler; you’re the jackpot.

  The process of A/B testing itself has become increasingly refined over time. The most canonical A/B setup—splitting the traffic evenly between two options, running the test for a set period of time, and thereafter giving all the traffic to the winner—might not necessarily be the best algorithm for solving the problem, since it means half the users are stuck getting the inferior option as long as the test continues. And the rewards for finding a better approach are potentially very high. More than 90% of Google’s approximately $50 billion in annual revenue currently comes from paid advertising, and online commerce comprises hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This means that explore/exploit algorithms effectively power, both economically and technologically, a significant fraction of the Internet itself. The best algorithms to use remain hotly contested, with rival statisticians, engineers, and bloggers endlessly sparring about the optimal way to balance exploration and exploitation in every possible business scenario.

  Debating the precise distinctions among various takes on the explore/exploit problem may seem hopelessly arcane. In fact, these distinctions turn out to matter immensely—and it’s not just presidential elections and the Internet economy that are at stake.

  It’s also human lives.

  Clinical Trials on Trial

  Between 1932 and 1972, several hundred African-American men with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, went deliberately untreated by medical professionals, as part of a forty-year experiment by the US Public Health Service known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In 1966, Public Health Service employee Peter Buxtun filed a protest. He filed a second protest in 1968. But it was not until he broke the story to the press—it appeared in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, and was the front-page story in the New York Times the next day—that the US government finally halted the study.

  What followed the public outcry, and the subsequent congressional hearing, was an initiative to formalize the principles and standards of medical ethics. A commission held at the pastoral Belmont Conference Center in Maryland resulted in a 1979 document known as the Belmont Report. The Belmont Report lays out a foundation for the ethical practice of medical experiments, so that the Tuskegee experiment—an egregious, unambiguously inappropriate breach of the health profession’s duty to its patients—might never be repeated. But it also notes the difficulty, in many other cases, of determining exactly where the line should be drawn.

  “The Hippocratic maxim ‘do no harm’ has long been a fundamental principle of medical ethics,” the report points out. “[The physiologist] Claude Bernard extended it to the realm of research, saying that one should not injure one person regardless of the benefits that might come to others. However, even avoiding harm requires learning what is harmful; and, in the process of obtaining this information, persons may be exposed to risk of harm.”

  The Belmont Report thus acknowledges, but does not resolve, the tension that exists between acting on one’s best knowledge and gathering more. It also makes it clear that gathering knowledge can be so valuable that some aspects of normal medical ethics can be suspended. Clinical testing of new drugs and treatments, the report notes, often requires risking harm to some patients, even if steps are taken to minimize that risk.

  The principle of beneficence is not always so unambiguous. A difficult ethical problem remains, for example, about research [on childhood diseases] that presents more than minimal risk without immediate prospect of direct benefit to the children involved. Some have argued that such research is inadmissible, while others have pointed out that this limit would rule out much research promising great benefit to children in the future. Here again, as with all hard cases, the different claims covered by the principle of beneficence may come into conflict and force difficult choices.

  One of the fundamental questions that has arisen in the decades since the Belmont Report is whether the standard approach to conducting clinical trials really does minimize risk to patients. In a conventional clinical trial, patients are split into groups, and each group is assigned to receive a different treatment for the duration of the study. (Only in exceptional cases does a trial get stopped early.) This procedure focuses on decisively resolving the question of which treatment is better, rather than on providing the best treatment to each patient in the trial itself. In this way it operates exactly like a website’s A/B test, with a certain fraction of people receiving an experience during the experiment that will eventually be proven inferior. But doctors, like tech companies, are gaining some information about which option is better while the trial proceeds—information that could be used to improve outcomes not only for future patients beyond the trial, but for the patients currently in it.

  Millions of dollars are at stake in experiments to find the optimal configuration of a website, but in clinical trials, experimenting to find optimal treatments has direct life-or-death consequences. And a growing community of doctors and statisticians think that we’re doing it wrong: that we should be treating the selection of treatments as a multi-armed bandit problem, and trying to get the better treatments to people even while an experiment is in progress.

  In 1969, Marvin Zelen, a biostatistician who is now at Harvard, proposed conducting “adaptive” trials. One of the ideas he suggested was a randomized “play the winner” algorithm—a version of Win-Stay, Lose-Shift, in which the chance of using a given treatment is increased by each win and decreased by each loss. In Zelen’s procedure, you start with a hat that contains one ball for each of the two treatment options being studied. The treatment for the first patient is selected by drawing a ball at random from the hat (the ball is put back afterward). If the chosen treatment is a success, you put another ball for that treatment into the hat—now you have three balls, two of which are for the successful treatment. If it fails, then you put another ball for the other treatment into the hat, making it more likely you’ll choose the alternative.

  Zelen’s algorithm was first used in a clinical trial sixteen years later, for a study of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or “ECMO”—an audacious approach to treating respiratory failure in infants. Developed in the 1970s by Robert Bartlett of the University of Michigan, ECMO takes blood that’s heading for the lungs and routes it instead out of the body, where it is oxygenated by a machine and returned to the heart. It is a drastic measure, with risks of its own (including the possibility of embolism), but it offered a possible approach in situations where no other options remained. In 1975 ECMO saved the life of a newborn girl in Orange County, California, for whom even a ventilator was not providing enough oxygen. That girl has now celebrated he
r fortieth birthday and is married with children of her own. But in its early days the ECMO technology and procedure were considered highly experimental, and early studies in adults showed no benefit compared to conventional treatments.

  From 1982 to 1984, Bartlett and his colleagues at the University of Michigan performed a study on newborns with respiratory failure. The team was clear that they wanted to address, as they put it, “the ethical issue of withholding an unproven but potentially lifesaving treatment,” and were “reluctant to withhold a lifesaving treatment from alternate patients simply to meet conventional random assignment technique.” Hence they turned to Zelen’s algorithm. The strategy resulted in one infant being assigned the “conventional” treatment and dying, and eleven infants in a row being assigned the experimental ECMO treatment, all of them surviving. Between April and November of 1984, after the end of the official study, ten additional infants met the criteria for ECMO treatment. Eight were treated with ECMO, and all eight survived. Two were treated conventionally, and both died.

  These are eye-catching numbers, yet shortly after the University of Michigan study on ECMO was completed it became mired in controversy. Having so few patients in a trial receive the conventional treatment deviated significantly from standard methodology, and the procedure itself was highly invasive and potentially risky. After the publication of the paper, Jim Ware, professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, and his medical colleagues examined the data carefully and concluded that they “did not justify routine use of ECMO without further study.” So Ware and his colleagues designed a second clinical trial, still trying to balance the acquisition of knowledge with the effective treatment of patients but using a less radical design. They would randomly assign patients to either ECMO or the conventional treatment until a prespecified number of deaths was observed in one of the groups. Then they would switch all the patients in the study to the more effective treatment of the two.