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Record W4409257196 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0318820

Investigating statistical power of differential abundance studies

2025· article· en· W4409257196 on OpenAlexafffund
Michael Agronah, Benjamin M. Bolker

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS ONE · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicGut microbiota and health
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsAbundance (ecology)Statistical powerMicrobiomeBiologyTaxonPower analysisStatisticsComputational biologyPower (physics)Evolutionary biologyEcologyBioinformaticsMathematicsPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Identifying microbial taxa that differ in abundance between groups (control/treatment, healthy/diseased, etc.) is important for both basic and applied science. As in all scientific research, microbiome studies must have good statistical power to detect taxa with substantially different abundance between treatments; low power leads to poor precision and biased effect size estimates. Several studies have raised concerns about low power in microbiome studies. In this study, we investigate statistical power in differential abundance analysis. In particular, we present a novel approach for estimating the statistical power to detect effects at the level of individual taxa as a function of effect size (fold change) and mean abundance. We analyzed seven real case-control microbiome datasets and developed a novel method for simulating microbiome data. We illustrate how power varies with effect size and mean abundance; our results suggest that typical differential abundance studies are underpowered for detecting changes in individual taxon.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.262
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.623
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.738
Threshold uncertainty score0.910

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.2620.623
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.004
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.008
Scholarly communication0.0040.005
Open science0.0030.004
Research integrity0.0030.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.304
Teacher spread0.265 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designSimulation or modeling
DomainMethods
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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