NBZIMM: negative binomial and zero-inflated mixed models, with application to microbiome/metagenomics data analysis

Authors

Xinyan Zhang, Kennesaw State University
Nengjun Yi, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Department

Analytics and Data Science Institute

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2020

Abstract

© 2020, The Author(s). Background: Microbiome/metagenomic data have specific characteristics, including varying total sequence reads, over-dispersion, and zero-inflation, which require tailored analytic tools. Many microbiome/metagenomic studies follow a longitudinal design to collect samples, which further complicates the analysis methods needed. A flexible and efficient R package is needed for analyzing processed multilevel or longitudinal microbiome/metagenomic data. Results: NBZIMM is a freely available R package that provides functions for setting up and fitting negative binomial mixed models, zero-inflated negative binomial mixed models, and zero-inflated Gaussian mixed models. It also provides functions to summarize the results from fitted models, both numerically and graphically. The main functions are built on top of the commonly used R packages nlme and MASS, allowing us to incorporate the well-developed analytic procedures into the framework for analyzing over-dispersed and zero-inflated count or proportion data with multilevel structures (e.g., longitudinal studies). The statistical methods and their implementations in NBZIMM particularly address the data characteristics and the complex designs in microbiome/metagenomic studies. The package is freely available from the public GitHub repository https://github.com/nyiuab/NBZIMM. Conclusion: The NBZIMM package provides useful tools for complex microbiome/metagenomics data analysis.

Journal Title

BMC Bioinformatics

Volume

21

Issue

1

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1186/s12859-020-03803-z