Finding the best dog treat with statistics (opens in new tab)

Bebop is clearly being paid off by Big Chicken to skew the results

One thing I'm not following is how the side/order bias is being handled. OP measures a IMO very large bias towards left-hand treats, but it is unclear how that is handled (ahem)? Skimming https://github.com/adamwespiser/best-dog-treat/blame/main/an... doesn't help me understand if it is being modeled as a covariate to adjust for the bias or if it was dealt with by construction (eg. by always offering pairs twice, swapping hands), or what?

Incidentally OP if you want to make it more adaptive, you can just fit the B-T model each time, and grab a posterior sample of what the best pair is, and test that, which turns out to be Thompson sampling. I did this for fun with blind taste-testing of mineral waters: https://gwern.net/water

I love it. For years with my old dog I would give him a binary choice between two treats and intuitively got a sense of his favorites as well. More satisfying to me was giving him the choice, which (maybe I'm over personifying him) I think he liked to pick his favorite. He had stomach issues which limited him to really only a few types of treats, and it was obvious which were his favorites, but it was fun anyway. I miss that dog.

My dog's favorite treat is the most expensive one. Or the one that causes the most intestinal (and therefore cleanup) issues. All it takes is a pause and some brief math to see that a lot of (good for your dog) dog treats are $16/lb. That's not even remotely the most expensive. It's cheaper to feed them straight meat. I've resorted to making my own treats. It's like $4/lb, plus you know exactly what goes into it (mostly ground turkey, yams, rice/chickpea flour).

This just feels like an excuse to give your dog a statically significant amount of treats

This makes me wonder what the research is for whether certain types or breeds of dog prefer certain dog treats, and how individual dogs might develop a preference for one kind over another. Based on this experiment it doesn't seem like the type of meat matters much, since while the top ranked treat is chicken, his second favourite seems to be the duck one.

Author here: I did a quick experiment with my Greyhound, Bebop, to figure out the treat he prefers best using pair-wise comparison analyzed with the Bradley-Terry model. Same tech as Elo scores in chess, and several other places! Enjoy!

In my experience, it's usually a partly-rotten deer leg found in the bushes on a nature walk.

My dog told me to write that the set of treats is missing non bleached rawhide, other dehydrated meats (eg rabbit, goat, fish), animal parts (eg ears), and vegetables. Also, he volunteers.

Even in a simple setup with one dog and five treats, the measurement process can still sneak into the result

The best dog treat is always the treat the OTHER dog is eating.

Interesting read! I might replicate with my two whippets. What’s their inter-rater reliability?

You also should continue with a swap of the hands; randomize which one is in the left and record the results to see if the left bias is real

Add some interesting smells and dogs will eat absolutely anything.

Used tampons, literal shit, soiled underwear, dierhia, dead bird, freshly killed cat, they owners... It is basically a pig with collar that lives in your house.

Our Malinois really liked the dehydrated chicken too, currently finishing a bag of the Trader Joes organic chicken jerky sticks. Interesting idea for some experiments, thanks for sharing

I missed the word "Treat" in the title initially and I was incensed. All dogs are the best dog TYVM.

You should really try Growlers dog bones.

https://growlersdogbones.org/

nothing beats diy dehydrated turkey mince stripes... but pita to make them )))

Beautiful hound!

I can sell a dog anything. It helps that I speak fluent dog and most of the dialects, except yap, and bark³ bark³ bark³ bark³ bark³. It also helps that I truely love dogs and they love me, or at least are very attentive of and curious about, and possibly get completly wound up and loose there fluffy minds around, but I live with a horse. Anyway, dogs and things they can, shall we say, interact with oraly, just to be safe, which includes tiny little unidentifiable things they very delicatly nibble with just there front teath, and entire car interiors and hotel rooms, reduced to a even mulch, some of which makes it all the way through there digestive track, these I bring up as they are spontainious choices, free from any possibility of testing bias. But all in all, of my many observations, good meat tended carefully on a charcoal barbeque is paws down going to win 100/100, but they also like chicken poop, hoof trimmings, and afterbirth, which is a far from complete list. Then, we can get into the things dogs luxurate in rolling themselves in if you realy want to make them happy.