Evaluating offline functionality of progressive web applications in e-commerce business: A/B testing and causal models

The project is to understand the potential impact of enabling the offline functionalities on progressive web application utilized as e-commerce platforms. For instance, will enabling offline functionalities help increase revenue by providing a more engaging environment when the connection is poor? Traditional evaluation method is to run online controlled experiments by randomly assigning users into two groups: with and without the feature. However, to accurate assess the impact, one needs to identify appropriate key metrics to quantify the performance. There is no universal guideline for the choice of key metrics and it might not be economically-feasible and slow to run experiments. This research tries to explore a class of emerging methods for causal inferences and counterfactual analysis to establish causation by asking what would have happened in the absence of the intervention, namely the introduction of the offline functionalities in our setting. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Natalia Nolde

Student:

Yiwei Hou

Partner:

Mobify Research and Development Inc

Discipline:

Statistics / Actuarial sciences

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Program: