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Summary Phylogenetic association analysis plays a crucial role in investigating the correlation between microbial compositions and specific outcomes of interest in microbiome studies. However, existing methods for testing such associations have limitations related to the assumption of a linear association in high-dimensional settings and the handling of confounding effects. Hence, there is a need for methods capable of characterizing complex associations, including nonmonotonic relationships. This article introduces a novel phylogenetic association analysis framework and associated tests to address these challenges by employing conditional rank correlation as a measure of association. The proposed tests account for confounders in a fully nonparametric manner, ensuring robustness against outliers and the ability to detect diverse dependencies. The proposed framework aggregates conditional rank correlations for subtrees using weighted sum and maximum approaches to capture both dense and sparse signals. The significance level of the test statistics is determined by calibration through a nearest-neighbour bootstrapping method, which is straightforward to implement and can accommodate additional datasets when these are available. The practical advantages of the proposed framework are demonstrated through numerical experiments using both simulated and real microbiome datasets.
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CAT: a conditional association test for microbiome data using a permutation approach
Abstract In microbiome analysis, researchers often seek to identify taxonomic features associated with an outcome of interest. However, microbiome features are intercorrelated and linked by phylogenetic relationships, making it challenging to assess the association between an individual feature and an outcome. This paper proposes a novel conditional association test, CAT, that can account for other features and phylogenetic relatedness when testing the association between a feature and an outcome. CAT adopts a permutation approach, measuring the importance of a feature in predicting the outcome by permuting operational taxonomic unit/amplicon sequence variant counts belonging to that feature from the data and quantifying how much the association with the outcome is weakened through the change in the coefficient of determination $$R^{2}$$. Compared with marginal association tests, it focuses on the added value of a feature in explaining outcome variation that is not captured by other features. By leveraging global tests including PERMANOVA and MiRKAT-based methods, CAT allows association testing for continuous, binary, categorical, count, survival, and correlated outcomes. We demonstrate through simulation studies that CAT can provide a direct quantification of feature importance that is distinct from that of marginal association tests, and illustrate CAT with applications to two real-world studies on the microbiome in melanoma patients: one examining the role of the microbiome in shaping immunotherapy response, and one investigating the association between the microbiome and survival outcomes. Our results illustrate the potential of CAT to inform the design of microbiome interventions aimed at improving clinical outcomes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2310955
- PAR ID:
- 10614498
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Briefings in Bioinformatics
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1467-5463
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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