Extreme undisclosed analytical flexibility in HRV with automated p‐mining software
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology, Science Policy
- Keywords
- heart rate variability, HRV
- Copyright
- © 2014 Heathers et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Extreme undisclosed analytical flexibility in HRV with automated p‐mining software. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e277v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.277v1
Abstract
Heart rate variability (HRV) is the study of the beat‐to‐beat variability in the heart rate, which is a consequence of the immediate state of the autonomic nervous system. While it is a popular psychobiological technique, flexibility within analytical methods allows any finding to be presented as significant.Here we present a potential demonstration of this, by automating analytical decisions to manipulate findings into significance by automating an extreme number of different yet plausible paths for analysis (PMinerEKG).It should be possible to demonstrate ‘extremely significant’ ‐ and entirely spurious ‐ differences between even extremely similar datasets simply by performing enough analyses.
Author Comment
This is a pre-registration of a paper to be prepared, consistent with the Open Science framework: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/home/