Understanding the bias of compositional microbiome differential abundance estimation (opens in new tab)

One of the most relevant objectives in microbiome studies is the identification of microbial species that are differentially abundant across conditions. However, the compositional nature of microbiome data complicates this task. Interdependence among components leads to spurious associations when the abundances of each component are analyzed separately. Due to the growing awareness of the challenges of compositional data analysis (CoDA), log-ratio transformations, such as the additive log-rat...