Interactions between species introduce spurious associations in microbiome studies
Published in PLoS Computational Biology, 2017
Recommended citation: Menon,R.;Ramanan,V.;Korolev,K. (2017) "Interactions between species introduce spurious associations in microbiome studies." PLoS Computational Biology. DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005939. https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005939#sec007
Interactions between populations of microbes in microbiomes influence one anothers population distributions, thus standard statistical analysis between two microbiome datasets may find more statistically significant, but non-interpretable, taxa of difference. This method, termed Direct Association Analysis, uses maximum entropy principles to correct for microbial interaction noise and identify potential causative taxa by removing taxa that are influencing one another, rather than driving the differential.
Recommended citation: Menon,R.;Ramanan,V.;Korolev,K. (2017). “Interactions between species introduce spurious associations in microbiome studies.” PLoS Computational Biology. DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005939..