Elementary methods provide more replicable results in microbial differential abundance analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pelto, Juho, Auranen, Kari, Kujala, Janne, Lahti, Leo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Pelto, Juho
Auranen, Kari
Kujala, Janne
Lahti, Leo
author_facet Pelto, Juho
Auranen, Kari
Kujala, Janne
Lahti, Leo
contents Differential abundance analysis is a key component of microbiome studies. Although dozens of methods exist there is currently no consensus on the preferred methods. While the correctness of results in differential abundance analysis is an ambiguous concept and cannot be fully evaluated without setting the ground truth and employing simulated data, we argue that a well-performing method should be effective in producing highly reproducible results. We compared the performance of 14 differential abundance analysis methods by employing datasets from 53 taxonomic profiling studies based on 16S rRNA gene or shotgun metagenomic sequencing. For each method, we examined how the results replicated between random partitions of each dataset and between datasets from separate studies. While certain methods showed good consistency, some widely used methods were observed to produce a substantial number of conflicting findings. Overall, when considering consistency together with sensitivity, the best performance was attained by analyzing relative abundances with a non-parametric method (Wilcoxon test or ordinal regression model) or linear regression/t-test. Moreover, a comparable performance was obtained by analyzing presence/absence of taxa with logistic regression.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_02691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Elementary methods provide more replicable results in microbial differential abundance analysis
Pelto, Juho
Auranen, Kari
Kujala, Janne
Lahti, Leo
Applications
Differential abundance analysis is a key component of microbiome studies. Although dozens of methods exist there is currently no consensus on the preferred methods. While the correctness of results in differential abundance analysis is an ambiguous concept and cannot be fully evaluated without setting the ground truth and employing simulated data, we argue that a well-performing method should be effective in producing highly reproducible results. We compared the performance of 14 differential abundance analysis methods by employing datasets from 53 taxonomic profiling studies based on 16S rRNA gene or shotgun metagenomic sequencing. For each method, we examined how the results replicated between random partitions of each dataset and between datasets from separate studies. While certain methods showed good consistency, some widely used methods were observed to produce a substantial number of conflicting findings. Overall, when considering consistency together with sensitivity, the best performance was attained by analyzing relative abundances with a non-parametric method (Wilcoxon test or ordinal regression model) or linear regression/t-test. Moreover, a comparable performance was obtained by analyzing presence/absence of taxa with logistic regression.
title Elementary methods provide more replicable results in microbial differential abundance analysis
topic Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02691