AUTHOR=He Linchen , Wang Chan , Hu Jiyuan , Gao Zhan , Falcone Emilia , Holland Steven M. , Blaser Martin J. , Li Huilin TITLE=ARZIMM: A Novel Analytic Platform for the Inference of Microbial Interactions and Community Stability from Longitudinal Microbiome Study JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics VOLUME=13 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2022.777877 DOI=10.3389/fgene.2022.777877 ISSN=1664-8021 ABSTRACT=

Dynamic changes of microbiome communities may play important roles in human health and diseases. The recent rise in longitudinal microbiome studies calls for statistical methods that can model the temporal dynamic patterns and simultaneously quantify the microbial interactions and community stability. Here, we propose a novel autoregressive zero-inflated mixed-effects model (ARZIMM) to capture the sparse microbial interactions and estimate the community stability. ARZIMM employs a zero-inflated Poisson autoregressive model to model the excessive zero abundances and the non-zero abundances separately, a random effect to investigate the underlining dynamic pattern shared within the group, and a Lasso-type penalty to capture and estimate the sparse microbial interactions. Based on the estimated microbial interaction matrix, we further derive the estimate of community stability, and identify the core dynamic patterns through network inference. Through extensive simulation studies and real data analyses we evaluate ARZIMM in comparison with the other methods.