Bioinformatic And Statistical Analysis Of Microbiome Data

This unique book addresses the bioinformatic and statistical modelling and also the analysis of microbiome data using cutting-edge QIIME 2 and R software. It covers core analysis topics in both bioinformatics and statistics, which provides a complete workflow for microbiome data analysis: from raw sequencing reads to community analysis and statistical hypothesis testing. It includes real-world data from the authors’ research and from the public domain, and discusses the implementation of QIIME 2 and R for data analysis step-by-step. The data as well as QIIME 2 and R computer programs are publicly available, allowing readers to replicate the model development and data analysis presented in each chapter so that these new methods can be readily applied in their own research. Bioinformatic and Statistical Analysis of Microbiome Data is an ideal book for advanced graduate students and researchers in the clinical, biomedical, agricultural, and environmental fields, as well as those studying bioinformatics, statistics, and big data analysis.

Microbiome research has focused on microorganisms that live within the human body and their effects on health. During the last few years, the quantification of microbiome composition in different environments has been facilitated by the advent of high throughput sequencing technologies. The statistical challenges include computational difficulties due to the high volume of data; normalization and quantification of metabolic abundances, relative taxa and bacterial genes; high-dimensionality; multivariate analysis; the inherently compositional nature of the data; and the proper utilization of complementary phylogenetic information. This has resulted in an explosion of statistical approaches aimed at tackling the unique opportunities and challenges presented by microbiome data. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in statistical and informatics technologies for microbiome research. In addition to reviewing demonstrably successful cutting-edge methods, particular emphasis is placed on examples in R that rely on available statistical packages for microbiome data. With its wide-ranging approach, the book benefits not only trained statisticians in academia and industry involved in microbiome research, but also other scientists working in microbiomics and in related fields.

This unique book addresses the statistical modelling and analysis of microbiome data using cutting-edge R software. It includes real-world data from the authors’ research and from the public domain, and discusses the implementation of R for data analysis step by step. The data and R computer programs are publicly available, allowing readers to replicate the model development and data analysis presented in each chapter, so that these new methods can be readily applied in their own research. The book also discusses recent developments in statistical modelling and data analysis in microbiome research, as well as the latest advances in next-generation sequencing and big data in methodological development and applications. This timely book will greatly benefit all readers involved in microbiome, ecology and microarray data analyses, as well as other fields of research.

This unique book officially defines microbiome statistics as a specific new field of statistics and addresses the statistical analysis of correlation, association, interaction, and composition in microbiome research. It also defines the study of the microbiome as a hypothesis-driven experimental science and describes two microbiome research themes and six unique characteristics of microbiome data, as well as investigating challenges for statistical analysis of microbiome data using the standard statistical methods. This book is useful for researchers of biostatistics, ecology, and data analysts. Presents a thorough overview of statistical methods in microbiome statistics of parametric and nonparametric correlation, association, interaction, and composition adopted from classical statistics and ecology and specifically designed for microbiome research. Performs step-by-step statistical analysis of correlation, association, interaction, and composition in microbiome data. Discusses the issues of statistical analysis of microbiome data: high dimensionality, compositionality, sparsity, overdispersion, zero-inflation, and heterogeneity. Investigates statistical methods on multiple comparisons and multiple hypothesis testing and applications to microbiome data. Introduces a series of exploratory tools to visualize composition and correlation of microbial taxa by barplot, heatmap, and correlation plot. Employs the Kruskal–Wallis rank-sum test to perform model selection for further multi-omics data integration. Offers R code and the datasets from the authors’ real microbiome research and publicly available data for the analysis used. Remarks on the advantages and disadvantages of each of the methods used.

This volume provides a collection of protocols from researchers in the statistical genomics field. Chapters focus on integrating genomics with other “omics” data, such as transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and metagenomics. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Cutting-edge and thorough, Statistical Genomics hopes that by covering these diverse and timely topics researchers are provided insights into future directions and priorities of pan-omics and the precision medicine era.

High-throughput sequencing technologies are widely used to study microbial ecology across species and habitats in order to understand the impacts of microbial communities on host health, metabolism, and the environment. Due to the dynamic nature of microbial communities, longitudinal microbiome analyses play an essential role in these types of investigations. Key questions in microbiome studies aim at identifying specific microbial taxa, enterotypes, genes, or metabolites associated with specific outcomes, as well as potential factors that influence microbial communities. However, the characteristics of microbiome data, such as sparsity and skewedness, combined with the nature of data collection, reflected often as uneven sampling or missing data, make commonly employed statistical approaches to handle repeated measures in longitudinal studies inadequate. Therefore, many researchers have begun to investigate methods that could improve incorporating these features when studying clinical, host, metabolic, or environmental associations with longitudinal microbiome data. In addition to the inferential aspect, it is also becoming apparent that visualization of high dimensional data in a way which is both intelligible and comprehensive is another difficult challenge that microbiome researchers face. Visualization is crucial in both the analysis and understanding of metagenomic data. Researchers must create clear graphic representations that give biological insight without being overly complicated. Thus, this Research Topic seeks to both review and provide novels approaches that are being developed to integrate microbiome data and complex metadata into meaningful mathematical, statistical and computational models. We believe this topic is fundamental to understanding the importance of microbial communities and provides a useful reference for other investigators approaching the field.