Explain regression discontinuity with an example

Last updated: December 30, 2025

Quick Overview

Explain regression discontinuity in simple terms and provide a concrete example.

Notion
Analytics & Experimentation
Data Scientist
Notion
December 30, 2025
Data Scientist
Take-home Project
Analytics & Experimentation
Easy

2

11

201 solved


Explain regression discontinuity in simple terms and provide a concrete example.

Analytics questions at Notion evaluate your ability to define metrics, design experiments, and derive actionable insights from data. This Take-home Project question tests your end-to-end analytical thinking.

What the Interviewer Expects
  • Define clear success metrics aligned with business goals
  • Propose a basic experimental design with control and treatment groups
  • Interpret results correctly and draw reasonable conclusions
  • Identify obvious confounding variables
Key Topics to Cover
Guardrail metrics
Metric definition and success criteria
Funnel analysis and cohort analysis
Long-term vs short-term metrics
Simpson's paradox and ecological fallacy
Segmentation and heterogeneous effects
How to Approach This
  1. Define success metrics carefully. A good metric is measurable, actionable, and aligned with business goals.
  2. Run experiments long enough to account for novelty effects and weekly seasonality.
  3. Use funnel analysis to identify where users drop off for maximum optimization impact.
  4. Segment results by key dimensions (platform, country, user cohort) to catch hidden patterns.
  5. Consider network effects and interference between treatment and control groups.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • What if you discover a bug in the logging during the experiment?
  • What would you do if a stakeholder wants to end the experiment early because initial results look good?
  • How would you handle seasonality in your experiment?
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Sample Answer
Problem Setup

The analytical question at hand is to assess the impact of a new user onboarding feature at Notion. Specifically, we want to determine if users who sign up just above a certain score threshold (e.g., ...

Methodology

For this analysis, we will employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD). This approach is suitable because it exploits the discontinuity at the threshold (score of 70 points) to estimate the causal ...


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