Differential Abundance Analysis by Consensus
Differential abundance testing in microbiome data challenges both parametric and non-parametric statistical methods, due to its sparsity, high variability and compositional nature. Microbiome-specific statistical methods often assume classical distribution models or take into account compositional specifics. These produce results that range within the specificity vs sensitivity space in such a way that type I and type II error that are difficult to ascertain in real microbiome data when a single method is used. Recently, a consensus approach based on multiple differential abundance (DA) methods was recently suggested in order to increase robustness. With dar, you can use dplyr-like pipeable sequences of DA methods and then apply different consensus strategies. In this way we can obtain more reliable results in a fast, consistent and reproducible way.
