Power-enhanced two-sample mean tests for high-dimensional microbiome compositional data

Testing differences in mean vectors is a fundamental task in the analysis of high-dimensional microbiome compositional data. Existing methods may suffer from low power if the underlying signal pattern is in a situation that does not favor the deployed test. In this work, we develop 2-sample power-enhanced mean tests for high-dimensional compositional data based on the combination of $P$-values, which integrates strengths from 2 popular types of tests: the maximum-type test and the quadratic-type test. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees on the proposed tests, showing accurate Type-I error rate control and enhanced testing power. Our method boosts the testing power toward a broader alternative space, which yields robust performance across a wide range of signal pattern settings. Our methodology and theory also contribute to the literature on power enhancement and Gaussian approximation for high-dimensional hypothesis testing. We demonstrate the performance of our method on both simulated data and real-world microbiome data, showing that our proposed approach improves the testing power substantially compared to existing methods.