Host phenotype classification from human microbiome data is mainly driven by the presence of microbial taxa
Fig 2
Classification accuracies are robust to degradation from genus-level relative abundance to presence/absence profiles in 16S rRNA datasets.
Results obtained on 30 case-control studies for host phenotype classification from human microbiomes. (A) Number of case and control samples across the different studies. (B) AUC and (C) AUPRC scores using RF as back-end classifiers on species-level taxonomic profiles. Comparison between relative abundance (in blue) and presence/absence (in red) profiles highlighted negligible differences and no statistical differences in none of the studies (see S5 Table for p-values) as found also in shotgun datasets (see Fig 1). Metrics of comparison in terms of AUC, AUPRC, precision, recall, and F1 are summarized in S5 Table. (C) Number of statistically significant taxa from relative abundance (in blue) and presence/absence (in red) profiles.