Data-Driven Persona-Conditioned Agents for A/B Test Simulation

Abstract:A/B testing is the gold standard for evaluating product changes, but each experiment requires real user traffic, engineering effort, and weeks of measurement. We propose a simulation framework that predicts A/B test outcomes using LLM-powered agents conditioned on data-driven personas grounded in real user behavioral signals. Unlike prior work that relies on synthetic or rule-based personas, our agents are constructed from anonymized behavioral data-activity patterns, engagement signals, and inferred demographics-enabling more faithful population modeling. We frame A/B test simulation as a structured question task and systematically study (i) question design formats, (ii) the impact of persona data source and domain alignment, (iii) the trade-off between per-persona behavioral depth and population diversity, and (iv) efficient population subsampling. On a benchmark of 40 A/B tests spanning two metric types, our best configuration achieves 0.75-0.90 directional accuracy depending on the test metric, demonstrating that data-driven personas are a viable path toward fast, low-cost experiment pre-screening.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.01038 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.01038v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01038 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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