SplinectomeR Enables Group Comparisons in Longitudinal Microbiome Studies.
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| Abstract | Longitudinal, prospective studies often rely on multi-omics approaches, wherein various specimens are analyzed for genomic, metabolomic, and/or transcriptomic profiles. In practice, longitudinal studies in humans and other animals routinely suffer from subject dropout, irregular sampling, and biological variation that may not be normally distributed. As a result, testing hypotheses about observations over time can be statistically challenging without performing transformations and dramatic simplifications to the dataset, causing a loss of longitudinal power in the process. Here, we introduce splinectomeR, an R package that uses smoothing splines to summarize data for straightforward hypothesis testing in longitudinal studies. The package is open-source, and can be used interactively within R or run from the command line as a standalone tool. We present a novel in-depth analysis of a published large-scale microbiome study as an example of its utility in straightforward testing of key hypotheses. We expect that splinectomeR will be a useful tool for hypothesis testing in longitudinal microbiome studies. |
| Year of Publication | 2018
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| Journal | Front Microbiol
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| Volume | 9
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| Pages | 785
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| Date Published | 2018
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| ISSN | 1664-302X
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| DOI | 10.3389/fmicb.2018.00785
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| PubMed ID | 29740416
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| PubMed Central ID | PMC5924793
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