title: Inferring human microbial dynamics from temporal metagenomics data: Pitfalls and lessons.
abstract: The human gut microbiota is a very complex and dynamic ecosystem that plays a crucial role in health and well-being. Inferring microbial community structure and dynamics directly from time-resolved metagenomics data is key to understanding the community ecology and predicting its temporal behavior. Many methods have been proposed to perform the inference. Yet, as we point out in this review, there are several pitfalls along the way. Indeed, the uninformative temporal measurements and the compositional nature of the relative abundance data raise serious challenges in inference. Moreover, the inference results can be largely distorted when only focusing on highly abundant species by ignoring or grouping low-abundance species. Finally, the implicit assumptions in various regularization methods may not reflect reality. Those issues have to be seriously considered in ecological modeling of human gut microbiota.
authors.affiliation: Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.|Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.|Chu Kochen Honors College, College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
authors.forename: Hong-Tai
authors.initials: HT
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.affiliation: Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Travis E
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.affiliation: Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.|Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
authors.forename: Amir
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bashan
authors.affiliation: Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.|Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Yang-Yu
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics*; D058448:Biota; D000069196:Gastrointestinal Microbiome / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods*; D056265:Microbial Interactions; D008954:Models, Biological
keywords: dynamics inference; ecological modeling; human microbiome; temporal metagenomics