2.7.3. Analysis of Overall Association and Taxonomic Profile
fits, MiRKAT
REGRESSION
The MiRKAT family of tests was used to assess overall association between taxonomic compositional profiles and treatment group [Assessment of microbiota components showing differential abundance between treatment groups was evaluated using CoDA-lasso enriched with stability analysis. CoDA-lasso is a multivariate approach that fits a regularized logistic regression model with an additional constraint on the regression coefficient due to the compositional nature of relative abundance data [The relevance of each selected taxon to discriminate between the treatment groups was investigated assessing variable importance in prediction with random forests. Each random forest comprised 500 non-pruned classification trees. Reported results comprised the selected taxa sorted according to their relative relevance in prediction, a sample estimate of the log-fold difference between the mean abundance of each group, and a heatmap of the taxa prevalence in each compared group.