English

A recipe for irreproducible results

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2017-06-26 v1

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that many results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are not reproducible. This raises the following question: why is it so easy to fool myself into believing that a result is reliable when in fact it is not? Using Brownian motion as a toy model, we show how this can happen if ergodicity is assumed where it is unwarranted. A measured value can appear stable when judged over time, although it is not stable across the ensemble: a different result will be obtained each time the experiment is run.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.07773,
  title  = {A recipe for irreproducible results},
  author = {Ole Peters and Maximilian Werner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07773},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

11 pages, 4 figures