Multivariable association discovery in population-scale meta-omics studies
Fig 4
MaAsLin 2 enables targeted microbial feature testing in the presence of repeated measures.
Results on simulated data comprising SparseDOSSA-derived compositions with five repeated measures per sample. The FDR is close to the target 0.05 level for MaAsLin 2’s default linear model but not for zero-inflated and count models (full results in S1–S8 Data). As before, MaAsLin 2’s linear model is consistently better powered than both negative binomial and limma VOOM at comparable FDR values, which remains consistent for both univariate continuous metadata (A) and multivariable metadata designs (B). The red line parallel to the x-axis is the given threshold for FDR in multiple testing. Within each panel, methods are sorted by increasing order of average F1 score across all associated simulation parameters in each setting.