Dataset Information

Assessment and Selection of Competing Models for Zero-Inflated Microbiome Data.

ABSTRACT: Typical data in a microbiome study consist of the operational taxonomic unit (OTU) counts that have the characteristic of excess zeros, which are often ignored by investigators. In this paper, we compare the performance of different competing methods to model data with zero inflated features through extensive simulations and application to a microbiome study. These methods include standard parametric and non-parametric models, hurdle models, and zero inflated models. We examine varying degrees of zero inflation, with or without dispersion in the count component, as well as different magnitude and direction of the covariate effect on structural zeros and the count components. We focus on the assessment of type I error, power to detect the overall covariate effect, measures of model fit, and bias and effectiveness of parameter estimations. We also evaluate the abilities of model selection strategies using Akaike information criterion (AIC) or Vuong test to identify the correct model. The simulation studies show that hurdle and zero inflated models have well controlled type I errors, higher power, better goodness of fit measures, and are more accurate and efficient in the parameter estimation. Besides that, the hurdle models have similar goodness of fit and parameter estimation for the count component as their corresponding zero inflated models. However, the estimation and interpretation of the parameters for the zero components differs, and hurdle models are more stable when structural zeros are absent. We then discuss the model selection strategy for zero inflated data and implement it in a gut microbiome study of > 400 independent subjects.

SUBMITTER: Xu L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4493133 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Assessment and Selection of Competing Models for Zero-Inflated Microbiome Data.

Xu Lizhen L Paterson Andrew D AD Turpin Williams W Xu Wei W

PloS one 20150706 7

Typical data in a microbiome study consist of the operational taxonomic unit (OTU) counts that have the characteristic of excess zeros, which are often ignored by investigators. In this paper, we compare the performance of different competing methods to model data with zero inflated features through extensive simulations and application to a microbiome study. These methods include standard parametric and non-parametric models, hurdle models, and zero inflated models. We examine varying degrees o ...[more]

PMID: 26148172

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Project description:Microorganisms play critical roles in human health and disease. They live in diverse communities in which they interact synergistically or antagonistically. Thus for estimating microbial associations with clinical covariates, such as treatment effects, joint (multivariate) statistical models are preferred. Multivariate models allow one to estimate and exploit complex interdependencies among multiple taxa, yielding more powerful tests of exposure or treatment effects than application of taxon-specific univariate analyses. Analysis of microbial count data also requires special attention because data commonly exhibit zero inflation, i.e., more zeros than expected from a standard count distribution. To meet these needs, we developed a Bayesian variable selection model for multivariate count data with excess zeros that incorporates information on the covariance structure of the outcomes (counts for multiple taxa), while estimating associations with the mean levels of these outcomes. Though there has been much work on zero-inflated models for longitudinal data, little attention has been given to high-dimensional multivariate zero-inflated data modeled via a general correlation structure. Through simulation, we compared performance of the proposed method to that of existing univariate approaches, for both the binary ("excess zero") and count parts of the model. When outcomes were correlated the proposed variable selection method maintained type I error while boosting the ability to identify true associations in the binary component of the model. For the count part of the model, in some scenarios the univariate method had higher power than the multivariate approach. This higher power was at a cost of a highly inflated false discovery rate not observed with the proposed multivariate method. We applied the approach to oral microbiome data from the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Cohort Oral Health Study and identified five (of 44) species associated with HIV infection.

Dataset Information

Assessment and Selection of Competing Models for Zero-Inflated Microbiome Data.

Publications

Assessment and Selection of Competing Models for Zero-Inflated Microbiome Data.

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