B0933
Title: A new approach to testing mediation of the microbiome at both the community and individual taxon levels
Authors: Yijuan Hu - Emory University (United States) [presenting]
Ye Yue - Emory University (United States)
Abstract: Understanding whether and which microbes played a mediating role between exposure and a disease outcome is essential to develop clinical interventions to treat the disease by modulating the microbes. Existing methods for mediation analysis of the microbiome are often limited to a global test of community-level mediation or selection of mediating microbes without control of the false discovery rate (FDR). We propose a new approach based on inverse regression that regresses the microbiome data at each taxon on the exposure and the exposure-adjusted outcome. This approach fits nicely into our Linear Decomposition Model (LDM) framework, so our new method LDM-med, implemented in the LDM framework, enjoys all the features of the LDM, e.g., allowing an arbitrary number of taxa to be tested simultaneously, supporting continuous, discrete, or multivariate exposures and outcomes (including survival outcomes) as well as adjustment of confounders, and offering analysis of the taxon data at the relative abundance or presence-absence scale. Using extensive simulations, we showed that LDM-med always preserved the FDR of testing individual taxa and had adequate sensitivity. LDM-med always controlled the type I error of the global test and had compelling power over existing methods. The flexibility of LDM-med for a variety of mediation analyses is illustrated by an application to a murine microbiome dataset, which identified several plausible mediating taxa.
