Related papers: A Phylogeny-based Test of Mediation Effect in Micr…
The statistical estimation of phylogenies is always associated with uncertainty, and accommodating this uncertainty is an important component of modern phylogenetic comparative analysis. The birth-death polytomy resolver is a method of…
Phylogenetic mixtures model the inhomogeneous molecular evolution commonly observed in data. The performance of phylogenetic reconstruction methods where the underlying data is generated by a mixture model has stimulated considerable recent…
Understanding the causal effects of organ-specific features from medical imaging on clinical outcomes is essential for biomedical research and patient care. We propose a novel Functional Linear Structural Equation Model (FLSEM) to capture…
Metagenomics provides a powerful new tool set for investigating evolutionary interactions with the environment. However, an absence of model-based statistical methods means that researchers are often not able to make full use of this…
We investigate how a filter media microstructure influences filtration performance. We derive a theory that generalizes classical multiscale models for regular structures to account for filter media with more realistic microstructures,…
In causal analysis, understanding the causal mechanisms through which an intervention or treatment affects an outcome is often of central interest. We propose a test to evaluate (i) whether the causal effect of a treatment that is randomly…
In microbiome analysis, researchers often seek to identify taxonomic features associated with an outcome of interest. However, microbiome features are intercorrelated and linked by phylogenetic relationships, making it challenging to assess…
One of the major research questions regarding human microbiome studies is the feasibility of designing interventions that modulate the composition of the microbiome to promote health and cure disease. This requires extensive understanding…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…
The preservation of soil health is a critical challenge in the 21st century due to its significant impact on agriculture, human health, and biodiversity. We provide the first deep investigation of the predictive potential of machine…
Improvements in sequencing technologies and reduced experimental costs have resulted in a vast number of studies generating high-throughput data. Although the number of methods to analyze these "omics" data has also increased, computational…
Causal mediation analysis usually requires strong assumptions, such as ignorability of the mediator, which may not hold in many social and scientific studies. Motivated by a multilevel randomized treatment experiment using functional…
Metagenomics is an approach for characterizing environmental microbial communities in situ, it allows their functional and taxonomic characterization and to recover sequences from uncultured taxa. For communities of up to medium diversity,…
Detecting associations between microbial compositions and sample characteristics is one of the most important tasks in microbiome studies. Most of the existing methods apply univariate models to single microbial species separately, with…
Growth rates and biomass yields are key descriptors used in microbiology studies to understand how microbial species respond to changes in the environment. Of these, biomass yield estimates are typically obtained using cell counts and…
Selective inference is considered for testing trees and edges in phylogenetic tree selection from molecular sequences. This improves the previously proposed approximately unbiased test by adjusting the selection bias when testing many trees…
The algebraic properties of flattenings and subflattenings provide direct methods for identifying edges in the true phylogeny -- and by extension the complete tree -- using pattern counts from a sequence alignment. The relatively small…
The human microbiome is a complex ecological system, and describing its structure and function under different environmental conditions is important from both basic scientific and medical perspectives. Viewed through a biostatistical lens,…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
Phylogenies are commonly used to represent the evolutionary relationships between species, and often these phylogenies are equipped with edge lengths that indicate degrees of evolutionary difference. Given such a phylogeny, a popular…