mbQTL

Pipeline for Statistical Inference of Associations between Microbial Communities And host phenoTypes (SIAMCAT). A primary goal of analyzing microbiome data is to determine changes in community composition that are associated with environmental factors. In particular, linking human microbiome composition to host phenotypes such as diseases has become an area of intense research. For this, robust statistical modeling and biomarker extraction toolkits are crucially needed. SIAMCAT provides a full pipeline supporting data preprocessing, statistical association testing, statistical modeling (LASSO logistic regression) including tools for evaluation and interpretation of these models (such as cross validation, parameter selection, ROC analysis and diagnostic model plots).

metaCCA performs multivariate analysis of a single or multiple GWAS based on univariate regression coefficients. It allows multivariate representation of both phenotype and genotype. metaCCA extends the statistical technique of canonical correlation analysis to the setting where original individual-level records are not available, and employs a covariance shrinkage algorithm to achieve robustness.

The GENESIS package provides methodology for estimating, inferring, and accounting for population and pedigree structure in genetic analyses. The current implementation provides functions to perform PC-AiR (Conomos et al., 2015, Gen Epi) and PC-Relate (Conomos et al., 2016, AJHG). PC-AiR performs a Principal Components Analysis on genome-wide SNP data for the detection of population structure in a sample that may contain known or cryptic relatedness. Unlike standard PCA, PC-AiR accounts for relatedness in the sample to provide accurate ancestry inference that is not confounded by family structure. PC-Relate uses ancestry representative principal components to adjust for population structure/ancestry and accurately estimate measures of recent genetic relatedness such as kinship coefficients, IBD sharing probabilities, and inbreeding coefficients. Additionally, functions are provided to perform efficient variance component estimation and mixed model association testing for both quantitative and binary phenotypes.

A differential abundance analysis for the comparison of two or more conditions. Useful for analyzing data from standard RNA-seq or meta-RNA-seq assays as well as selected and unselected values from in-vitro sequence selections. Uses a Dirichlet-multinomial model to infer abundance from counts, optimized for three or more experimental replicates. The method infers biological and sampling variation to calculate the expected false discovery rate, given the variation, based on a Wilcoxon Rank Sum test and Welch's t-test (via aldex.ttest), a Kruskal-Wallis test (via aldex.kw), a generalized linear model (via aldex.glm), or a correlation test (via aldex.corr). All tests report predicted p-values and posterior Benjamini-Hochberg corrected p-values. ALDEx2 also calculates expected standardized effect sizes for paired or unpaired study designs. ALDEx2 can now be used to estimate the effect of scale on the results and report on the scale-dependent robustness of results.

A novel framework to correct for batch effects prior to any downstream analysis in microbiome data based on Projection to Latent Structures Discriminant Analysis. The main method is named “PLSDA-batch”. It first estimates treatment and batch variation with latent components, then subtracts batch-associated components from the data whilst preserving biological variation of interest. PLSDA-batch is highly suitable for microbiome data as it is non-parametric, multivariate and allows for ordination and data visualisation. Combined with centered log-ratio transformation for addressing uneven library sizes and compositional structure, PLSDA-batch addresses all characteristics of microbiome data that existing correction methods have ignored so far. Two other variants are proposed for 1/ unbalanced batch x treatment designs that are commonly encountered in studies with small sample sizes, and for 2/ selection of discriminative variables amongst treatment groups to avoid overfitting in classification problems. These two variants have widened the scope of applicability of PLSDA-batch to different data settings.

gwasurvivr is a package to perform survival analysis using Cox proportional hazard models on imputed genetic data.