Description:

Yi-Juan Hu

Associate Professor
Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
Rollins School of Public Health
Emory University

Presentation Title:

Testing Presence-Absence Associations in the Microbiome

Abstract:

Many methods for testing association between the microbiome and covariates
of interest (e.g., clinical outcomes, environmental factors) assume that these associations are driven by changes in the relative abundance of taxa. However, these associations may also result from changes in which taxa are present and which are absent. Analyses of such presence-absence associations face a unique challenge: confounding by library size (total sample read count), which occurs when library size is associated with covariates in the analysis. It is known that rarefaction (subsampling to a common library size) controls this bias, but at the potential cost of information loss as well as the introduction of a stochastic component into the analysis. Currently, there is a need for robust and efficient methods for testing presence-absence associations in the presence of such confounding, both at the community level and at the individual-taxon level, that avoid the drawbacks of rarefaction.

For Zoom link please contact Lucia Ontiveros: lucia.ontiveros@northwestern.edu