MDiNE: A model to estimate differential co-occurrence networks in microbiome studies

Motivation The human microbiota is the collection of microorganisms colonizing the human body, and plays an integral part in human health. A growing trend in microbiome analysis is to construct a network to estimate the co-occurrence patterns among taxa though precision matrices. Existing methods do not facilitate investigation into how these networks change with respect to covariates. Results We propose a new model called Microbiome Differential Network Estimation (MDiNE) to estimate network changes with respect to a binary covariate. The counts of individual taxa in the samples are modelled through a multinomial distribution whose probabilities depend on a latent Gaussian random variable. A sparse precision matrix over all the latent terms determines the co-occurrence network among taxa. The model fit is obtained and evaluated using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods. The performance of our model is evaluated through an extensive simulation study, and is shown to outperform existing methods in terms of estimation of network parameters. We also demonstrate an application of the model to estimate changes in the intestinal microbial network topology with respect to Crohn’s disease. Availability and Implementation MDiNE is implemented in a freely available R package: https://github.com/kevinmcgregor/mdine . Supplementary information A file containing supplemental material has been submitted with this manuscript.