AB Experiment - Run experiment thru knobs. Experiment quicker, cheaper and at scale
A/B testing, causal questions, modeling experiment test hypothesis. All 3 methods try to find relationship between target variables and input variables. However these 3 methods ar used in different settings. There are some key differences between these methods.
Differences
A/B testing is conducted with real users in online enviornment. It is mostly used in e-commerce settings
Field experiements not done online. These are done in offline settings
Causal questions are more complex than a/b testing e.g does playing violant video game make people aggressive. Generally there are multiple variables. It is hard to randomize and make conslusion
Machine learning modeling experiments purpose is different. Focus is on build effective mdel by trying variety of feature engineering, algorithms, hyper paramter
Similarties
All of above focus on validating hypothesis and determine winning candidate
AB Experiment
AB Experiment provide knobs to define and execute experiments in controlled manner
It has modules and methods for A/B testing, asking causal question and doing ML experiment