Comparing perturbation models for evaluating stability of neuroimaging pipelines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With an increase in awareness regarding a troubling lack of reproducibility in analytical software tools, the degree of validity in scientific derivatives and their downstream results has become unclear. The nature of reproducibility issues may vary across domains, tools, data sets, and computational infrastructures, but numerical instabilities are thought to be a core contributor. In neuroimaging, unexpected deviations have been observed when varying operating systems, software implementations, or adding negligible quantities of noise. In the field of numerical analysis, these issues have recently been explored through Monte Carlo Arithmetic, a method involving the instrumentation of floating-point operations with probabilistic noise injections at a target precision. Exploring multiple simulations in this context allows the characterization of the result space for a given tool or operation. In this article, we compare various perturbation models to introduce instabilities within a typical neuroimaging pipeline, including (i) targeted noise, (ii) Monte Carlo Arithmetic, and (iii) operating system variation, to identify the significance and quality of their impact on the resulting derivatives. We demonstrate that even low-order models in neuroimaging such as the structural connectome estimation pipeline evaluated here are sensitive to numerical instabilities, suggesting that stability is a relevant axis upon which tools are compared, alongside more traditional criteria such as biological feasibility, computational efficiency, or, when possible, accuracy. Heterogeneity was observed across participants which clearly illustrates a strong interaction between the tool and data set being processed, requiring that the stability of a given tool be evaluated with respect to a given cohort. We identify use cases for each perturbation method tested, including quality assurance, pipeline error detection, and local sensitivity analysis, and make recommendations for the evaluation of stability in a practical and analytically focused setting. Identifying how these relationships and recommendations scale to higher order computational tools, distinct data sets, and their implication on biological feasibility remain exciting avenues for future work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.111 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".