Biostatistics Seminar Series - Christine B. Peterson, PhD

Title: "New approaches for integrating microbiome and covariate data."Abstract: The human microbiome consists of the population of microorganisms living in and on the human body. In recent years, advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have enabled comprehensive profiling of these populations. Microbiome data pose a number of statistical challenges, since they are count-based, compositional, and high-dimensional. In this talk, I will first discuss an approach to improve visualization of microbiome data, by adjusting for covariates such as batch or site in creating an ordination plot. I will then discuss a Bayesian approach to simultaneously estimate network interactions and associations to relevant covariates for microbiome data.