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Subject Areas
Architecture and Design
Arts
Asian and Pacific Studies
Business and Economics
Chemistry
Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Computer Sciences
Cultural Studies
Engineering
General Interest
Geosciences
History
Industrial Chemistry
Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
Jewish Studies
Law
Library and Information Science, Book Studies
Life Sciences
Linguistics and Semiotics
Literary Studies
Materials Sciences
Mathematics
Medicine
Music
Pharmacy
Philosophy
Physics
Social Sciences
Sports and Recreation
Theology and Religion
Abstract
Most scientists consider randomized experiments to be the best method available to establish causality. On the Internet, during the past twenty-five years, randomized experiments have become common, often referred to as A/B testing. For practical reasons, much A/B testing does not use pseudo-random number generators to implement randomization. Instead, hash functions are used to transform the distribution of identifiers of experimental units into a uniform distribution. Using two large, industry data sets, I demonstrate that the success of hash-based quasi-randomization strategies depends greatly on the hash function used: MD5 yielded good results, while SHA512 yielded less impressive ones.
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