[Fix] Return an empty array rather than throwing an exception if no QRS dat…

[ajb5d]

Description

This PR aims fixes an error where running ecg_peakdetect on a signal without any QRS complexes would throw an exception rather than returning an empty array. There are a couple of issues (mostly closed due to inactivity) that relate to this: #580, #472, #134

Proposed Changes

I changed the _ecg_findpeaks_neurokit() function so that the length of beg_qrs is checked before accessing the first element. If the array is empty then return an empty array rather than triggering a ValueException.

Checklist

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• I have read the CONTRIBUTING file.
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• I ran the CODE CHECKS on the files I added or modified and fixed the errors.
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[welcome]

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[danibene]

Hi @ajb5d , thank you for this contribution! I would suggest also adding a test of the case when the array should be empty if possible. I'm happy to help you do this if you need any support.

[DerAndereJohannes]

I see that you only put it on the neurokit method of the function i.e., _ecg_findpeaks_neurokit. Have you tested the other methods to see if they have the same result as your new version for neurokit? It would be nice to have consistent behaviour.

[ajb5d]

@DerAndereJohannes @danibene I added tests for the other methods (at least checking that they don't crash when run on empty input). I made a couple of other fixes to ensure that most methods handle empty input. Two small things not addressed (But I wanted to record for posterity):

• I had initially added a check that they return no peaks when presented a flat array but a couple of the methods do find peaks in an empty signal. That feels out of scope.
• The promac method calls other methods and returns errors when no peaks are found by those methods. I think the root cause is _ecg_findpeaks_promac_addconvolve line 223: mask[peaks] = 1 which fails when peaks is empty. I wasn't certain of the best way to handle this nested error so I'm leaving it untouched.

[ajb5d]

I think the failed test is related to visbilitygraph which has a numpy dependency issue (we don't require a specific numpy version, the scipy > 1.13 is pulling in numpy 2.0 which isn't compatible with ts2vg). I couldn't get it to run locally on my machine either (but figured it was worth a shot to see if it ran in CI).

[danibene]

Thanks for making these changes! If you are unable to get the test working for the vgraph method, I think it is fine to merge without for now, as long as it is documented as a known issue.

[ajb5d]

I added a comment and refactored the test method to use the parameterized methods.

[danibene]

Suggested change

	#vgraph is not included because it currently causes CI to fail (issue 1007)
	#vgraph is not included because it currently causes CI to fail (issue #1009)

[danibene]

Looks good to me!

[DominiqueMakowski]

amazing, thanks all!

[welcome]

Congrats on merging your first pull request! 🎉🍾 We're looking forward to your next one!