multiverse: Multiplexing Alternative Data Analyses in R Notebooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are myriad ways to analyze any given dataset. But which one to trust? In the face of such uncertainty, analysts adopt multiverse analysis: running all reasonable analyses on the dataset. Yet this is cognitively and technically difficult with existing tools—how does one specify and execute all combinations of reasonable analyses of a dataset?—and often requires discarding existing workflows. We present multiverse, a tool for implementing multiverse analyses in R with expressive syntax supporting existing computational notebook workflows. Informed by iterative user testing, multiverse supports building up a multiverse through local changes to a single analysis and optimises execution by pruning redundant computations. We evaluate four existing multiverse tools (including multiverse) using principles of cognitive ergonomics.We identify design tradeoffs (e.g. flexibility in locally defining decisions versus making it easy to understand a multiverse’s global structure), and suggest future directions for multiverse tool design, like more effective debugging support.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.013 |
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".