  A/B testing is a standard approach for evaluating the effect of online
experiments; the goal is to estimate the `average treatment effect' of a new
feature or condition by exposing a sample of the overall population to it. A
drawback with A/B testing is that it is poorly suited for experiments involving
social interference, when the treatment of individuals spills over to
neighboring individuals along an underlying social network. In this work, we
propose a novel methodology using graph clustering to analyze average treatment
effects under social interference. To begin, we characterize graph-theoretic
conditions under which individuals can be considered to be `network exposed' to
an experiment. We then show how graph cluster randomization admits an efficient
exact algorithm to compute the probabilities for each vertex being network
exposed under several of these exposure conditions. Using these probabilities
as inverse weights, a Horvitz-Thompson estimator can then provide an effect
estimate that is unbiased, provided that the exposure model has been properly
specified.
  Given an estimator that is unbiased, we focus on minimizing the variance.
First, we develop simple sufficient conditions for the variance of the
estimator to be asymptotically small in n, the size of the graph. However, for
general randomization schemes, this variance can be lower bounded by an
exponential function of the degrees of a graph. In contrast, we show that if a
graph satisfies a restricted-growth condition on the growth rate of
neighborhoods, then there exists a natural clustering algorithm, based on
vertex neighborhoods, for which the variance of the estimator can be upper
bounded by a linear function of the degrees. Thus we show that proper cluster
randomization can lead to exponentially lower estimator variance when
experimentally measuring average treatment effects under interference.
