Testing microbiome association using integrated quantile regression models

Most existing microbiome association analyses focus on the association between microbiome and conditional mean of health or disease-related outcomes, and within this vein, vast computational tools and methods have been devised for standard binary or continuous outcomes. However, these methods tend to be limited either when the underlying microbiome-outcome association occurs somewhere other than the mean level, or when distribution of the outcome variable is irregular (e.g. zero-inflated or mixtures) such that conditional outcome mean is less meaningful. We address this gap by investigating association analysis between microbiome compositions and conditional outcome quantiles.

We introduce a new association analysis tool named MiRKAT-IQ within the Microbiome Regression-based Kernel Association Test framework using Integrated Quantile regression models to examine the association between microbiome and the distribution of outcome. For an individual quantile, we utilize the existing kernel machine regression framework to examine the association between that conditional outcome quantile and a group of microbial features (e.g. microbiome community compositions). Then, the goal of examining microbiome association with the whole outcome distribution is achieved by integrating all outcome conditional quantiles over a process, and thus our new MiRKAT-IQ test is robust to both the location of association signals (e.g. mean, variance, median) and the heterogeneous distribution of the outcome. Extensive numerical simulation studies have been conducted to show the validity of the new MiRKAT-IQ test. We demonstrate the potential usefulness of MiRKAT-IQ with applications to actual biological data collected from a previous microbiome study.

R codes to implement the proposed methodology is provided in the MiRKAT package, which is available on CRAN.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.