topic Shared Control Groups in SAS Customer Intelligence

Shared Control Groups

chicoscai — Tue, 10 May 2016 18:00:56 GMT

Is there a way in CI Studio 6.3 to use the Holdout functionality (or A/B test functionality) and have a shared control group?

For example, I have a segment of customers that I need to hold out a control and also split the remainder into different groups based on an attribute.

Re: Shared Control Groups

dgsas — Wed, 11 May 2016 20:57:33 GMT

Hi Chicoscai,

Could you elaborate a bit more on what you're trying to accomplish? It sounds to me like you are creating Test and Control groups, and want to use the Test group to split into Marketing Cells based on additional criteria? You can do that through either a Split node, if based on a single data item, or by using Select nodes each with distinct criteria, all of which then go into a Prioritize to create mutually exclusive groups. The benefit of the Prioritize is it will create the end cells for you, which can then go into a Communication.

If you were thinking something different please respond with more detail.

Thanks

Re: Shared Control Groups

chicoscai — Wed, 11 May 2016 21:01:34 GMT

I have a group of customers in say Model rank 1. I need to pull a control from the entire group and then split the balance into specific other groups.

I don't want to use a split node, because the linkage between the mailed (test) and the control will not be written to the MA History Database tables. The Cell Linkage table will not be populated. When you use the A/B Test or the Communication Holdout functionality the linkage is written to the database. I need this to happen.

Re: Shared Control Groups

dgsas — Wed, 11 May 2016 21:49:15 GMT

So adding a Split will create a new parent to the Test sub-groups, and eliminate that parent/child relationship for all control and test groups. However, continuing down that road, after splitting the test groups, why not put all groups, control and smaller test groups, into a Prioritize. Have the Control Group as Priority 1, then arrange all others. The Cells will pop out and create a single parent/child relationship between all control/test groups. I don't know that there's any other better way to do it.

Re: Shared Control Groups

pcapazzi — Thu, 12 May 2016 18:11:28 GMT

If I understand you correctly I would like to see this functionality as well.

We have to provide data to a team where we manually link the various tests to a control group.

Example - coming out of a select node into a split we create... say it's split by 25% per segment:

Control Group - CELL1

Test Group 1 - CELL2

Test Group 2 - CELL3

Test Group 3 - CELL4

We have to associate CELL2,3,4 with CELL1 manually after the fact. If the linking tables can provide this information in MA 6.4 I would like to explore it. I don't think it's there. I think the Control Groups in MA are based on a one-to-one relationship.

Are we talking about the same thing chicoscai?

Re: Shared Control Groups

chicoscai — Thu, 12 May 2016 19:16:55 GMT

Yes we are! We did a work around where we are pulling the full
mail/control quantity and breaking that out by the segments. We then took
the % of total for each segment and applied that % to the control and used
A/B split nodes.

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