Related papers: Interactions between species introduce spurious as…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
Personalized models of the gut microbiome are valuable for disease prevention and treatment. For this, one requires a mathematical model that predicts microbial community composition and the emergent behavior of microbial communities. We…
Many scientific datasets are compositional in nature. Important biological examples include species abundances in ecology, cell-type compositions derived from single-cell sequencing data, and amplicon abundance data in microbiome research.…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
Vanderweele and Knol define biological interaction as an instance wherein "two exposures physically interact to bring about the outcome." A hallmark of biological interaction is that the total effect, produced when factors act together,…
The process of infection of a host is complex, influenced by factors such as microbial variation within and between hosts as well as differences in dose across hosts. This study uses dose-response and within-host microbial infection models…
Recent multi-omic microbiome studies enable integrative analysis of microbes and metabolites, uncovering their associations with various host conditions. Such analyses require multivariate models capable of accounting for the complex…
An important phenomenon in high dimensional biological data is the presence of unobserved covariates that can have a significant impact on the measured response. When these factors are also correlated with the covariate(s) of interest (i.e.…
Microbiome interventions provide valuable data about microbial ecosystem structure and dynamics. Despite their ubiquity in microbiome research, few rigorous data analysis approaches are available. In this study, we extend transfer…
In many observational studies in social science and medicine, subjects or units are connected, and one unit's treatment and attributes may affect another's treatment and outcome, violating the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA)…
Over the last two decades, many exciting variable selection methods have been developed for finding a small group of covariates that are associated with the response from a large pool. Can the discoveries from these data mining approaches…
The relationship between microscopic observations and macroscopic behavior is a fundamental open question in biophysical systems. Here, we develop a unified approach that---in contrast with existing methods---predicts cell type from…
Inferring concerted changes among biological traits along an evolutionary history remains an important yet challenging problem. Besides adjusting for spurious correlation induced from the shared history, the task also requires sufficient…
The striking variety of macroscopic morphologies displayed by bacterial colonies depends on microscopic environmental and behavioural details in a manner that is currently not well understood. A surprising example is sibling inhibition,…
Mediation analysis is an important tool for studying causal associations in biomedical and other scientific areas and has recently gained attention in microbiome studies. Using a microbiome study of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients, we…
Interaction patterns among individuals play vital roles in spreading infectious diseases. Understanding these patterns and integrating their impact in modeling diffusion dynamics of infectious diseases are important for epidemiological…
Human associated microbial communities exert tremendous influence over human health and disease. With modern metagenomic sequencing methods it is possible to follow the relative abundance of microbes in a community over time. These…
The interaction of two binary variables, assumed to be empirical observations, has three degrees of freedom when expressed as a matrix of frequencies. Usually, the size of causal influence of one variable on the other is calculated as a…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Microbiomes, which are collections of interacting microbes in an environment, often substantially impact the environmental patches or living hosts that they occupy. In microbiome models, it is important to consider both the local dynamics…