A Dirichlet-tree multinomial regression model for associating dietary nutrients with gut microorganisms.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the factors that alter the composition of the human microbiota may help personalized healthcare strategies and therapeutic drug targets. In many sequencing studies, microbial communities are characterized by a list of taxa, their counts, and their evolutionary relationships represented by a phylogenetic tree. In this article, we consider an extension of the Dirichlet multinomial distribution, called the Dirichlet-tree multinomial distribution, for multivariate, over-dispersed, and tree-structured count data. To address the relationships between these counts and a set of covariates, we propose the Dirichlet-tree multinomial regression model for which we develop a penalized likelihood method for estimating parameters and selecting covariates. For efficient optimization, we adop

SUBMITTER: Wang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5587402 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature