Data from: Automatic Definition of Robust Microbiome Sub-states in Longitudinal Data

Output files of the application of our R software (available at https://github.com/wilkinsonlab/robust-clustering-metagenomics) to different microbiome datasets already published.

Prefixes:

• David2014_: original microbiome dataset published in [David et al.,2014] (http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/7/R89)
• Ballou2016_: original microbiome dataset published in [Ballou et al.,2016] (http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fvets.2016.00002/full)
• Gajer2012_: original microbiome dataset published in [Gajer et al.,2012] (http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/132/132ra52.long)
• LaRosa2014_: original microbiome dataset published in [LaRosa et al.,2014] (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1409497111)

Suffixes:

• _All: all taxa

• _Dominant: only 1% most abundant taxa

• _NonDominant: remaining taxa after removing above dominant taxa

• _GenusAll: taxa aggregated at genus level

• _GenusDominant: taxa aggregated at genes level and then to select only 1% most abundant taxa

• _GenusNonDominant: taxa aggregated at genus level and then to remove 1% most abundant taxa

Each folder contains 3 output files related to the same input dataset:
- data.normAndDist_definitiveClustering_XXX.RData: R data file with a) a phyloseq object (including OTU table, meta-data and cluster assigned to each sample); and b) a distance matrix object.
- definitiveClusteringResults_XXX.txt: text file with assessment measures of the selected clustering.
- sampleId-cluster_pairs_XXX.txt: text file. Two columns, comma separated file: sampleID,clusterID

Abstract of the associated paper:

The analysis of microbiome dynamics would allow us to elucidate patterns within microbial community evolution; however, microbiome state-transition dynamics have been scarcely studied.  This is in part because a necessary first-step in such analyses has not been well-defined: how to deterministically describe a microbiome's "state". Clustering in states have been widely studied, although no standard has been concluded yet. We propose a generic, domain-independent and automatic procedure to determine a reliable set of microbiome sub-states within a specific dataset, and with respect to the conditions of the study. The robustness of sub-state identification is established by the combination of diverse techniques for stable cluster verification.  We reuse four distinct longitudinal microbiome datasets to demonstrate the broad applicability of our method, analysing results with different taxa subset allowing to adjust it depending on the application goal, and showing that the methodology provides a set of robust sub-states to examine in downstream studies about dynamics in microbiome.