Microbiome Toolbox: methodological approaches to derive and visualize microbiome trajectories

Abstract

Motivation: The gut microbiome changes rapidly under the influence of different factors such as age, dietary changes or medications to name just a few. To analyze and understand such changes, we present a Microbiome Toolbox. We implemented several methods for analysis and exploration to provide interactive visualizations for easy comprehension and reporting of longitudinal microbiome data. Results: Based on the abundance of microbiome features such as taxa as well as functional capacity modules, and with the corresponding metadata per sample, the Microbiome Toolbox includes methods for (i) data analysis and exploration, (ii) data preparation including dataset-specific preprocessing and transformation, (iii) best feature selection for log-ratio denominators, (iv) two-group analysis, (v) microbiome trajectory prediction with feature importance over time, (vi) spline and linear regression statistical analysis for testing universality across different groups and differentiation of two trajectories, (vii) longitudinal anomaly detection on the microbiome trajectory and (viii) simulated intervention to return anomaly back to a reference trajectory.