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  • 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.
    by thih9
  • In my experience, it's usually a partly-rotten deer leg found in the bushes on a nature walk.
    by zerobees
  • 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.
    by CM30
  • 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!
    by wespiser_2018
  • 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.
    by andrew_eu
  • This just feels like an excuse to give your dog a statically significant amount of treats
    by abofh
  • 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).
    by jnellis
  • 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

    by gwern

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