Network based differential abundance analysis: bridging community interactions and host microbiome dynamics
摘要
Differential abundance analysis is a critical task in microbiome research, aiming to identify microbial features (e.g., Amplicon Sequence Variant (ASV), Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU), taxa) that vary across conditions. Despite significant advancements, current leading methods (e.g., Analysis of Compositions of Microbiomes with Bias Correction (ANCOM-BC), ANCOM-BC2) face challenges in robustness and reproducibility, limiting their utility in complex ecological datasets. In this work, we propose a novel network-based approach for differential abundance analysis that integrates microbial interactions to improve accuracy and interpretability. Using simulated data generated from five empirical datasets by a third-party simulator, independent of all methods tested, our approach consistently outperforms ANCOM-BC and ANCOM-BC2 in terms of