Analysis of composition of microbiomes: a novel method for studying microbial composition

Understanding the factors regulating our microbiota is important but requires appropriate statistical methodology. When comparing two or more populations most existing approaches either discount the underlying compositional structure in the microbiome data or use probability models such as the multinomial and Dirichlet-multinomial distributions, which may impose a correlation structure not suitable for microbiome data.

To develop a methodology that accounts for compositional constraints to reduce false discoveries in detecting differentially abundant taxa at an ecosystem level, while maintaining high statistical power.