Statistical analysis of microbiome data: The challenge of sparsity

Microbiomes not only exist across many different body sites in human beings but also interact dynamically with the host and environment. The unique feature and complexity of 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequence data, especially the sparsity of the data, present challenges to statistical analysis and interpretation. Proper normalization is critical in ensuring the validity of downstream analysis. Modeling the inflated zeros is an active area of...