Extreme undisclosed analytical flexibility in HRV with automated p‐mining software

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.