Explaining diversity in metagenomic datasets by phylogenetic-based feature weighting.

ABSTRACT: Metagenomics is revolutionizing our understanding of microbial communities, showing that their structure and composition have profound effects on the ecosystem and in a variety of health and disease conditions. Despite the flourishing of new analysis methods, current approaches based on statistical comparisons between high-level taxonomic classes often fail to identify the microbial taxa that are differentially distributed between sets of samples, since in many cases the taxonomic schema do not allow an adequate description of the structure of the microbiota. This constitutes a severe limitation to the use of metagenomic data in therapeutic and diagnostic applications. To provide a more robust statistical framework, we introduce a class of feature-weighting algorithms that discriminate the

SUBMITTER: Albanese D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4376673 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature