Interpret a statistically significant lift of 2% from an experiment
Last updated: September 1, 2025
Quick Overview
An experiment shows a 3% lift with p=0.08. What conclusions can you draw? What are the caveats?
Palantir
September 1, 202518
4
3,701 solved
An experiment shows a 3% lift with p=0.08. What conclusions can you draw? What are the caveats?
Palantir asks this during the Take-home Project to assess your experimentation skills. They want to see how you define success metrics, design controlled experiments, and interpret results with appropriate statistical rigor.
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
How to Approach This
- Define success metrics carefully. A good metric is measurable, actionable, and aligned with business goals.
- Run experiments long enough to account for novelty effects and weekly seasonality.
- Use funnel analysis to identify where users drop off for maximum optimization impact.
- Segment results by key dimensions (platform, country, user cohort) to catch hidden patterns.
- Consider network effects and interference between treatment and control groups.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle interference between treatment and control?
- What if the experiment shows a positive short-term effect but you suspect a negative long-term impact?
- What if you discover a bug in the logging during the experiment?
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Browse Analytics QuestionsSample Answer
Problem Setup
In this experiment, we are analyzing the effect of a new feature introduced by Palantir that yielded a 3% lift in a key performance metric with a p-value of 0.08. The analytical question here is: "Is ...
Methodology
Given the p-value of 0.08, we are approaching the edge of typical significance (0.05). This suggests that while the lift is not statistically significant at the conventional level, it is close enough ...
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