Microbiome Regression-Based Kernel Association Tests

Test for overall association between microbiome composition data and phenotypes via phylogenetic kernels. The phenotype can be univariate continuous or binary (Zhao et al. (2015) ), survival outcomes (Plantinga et al. (2017) ), multivariate (Zhan et al. (2017) ) and structured phenotypes (Zhan et al. (2017) ). The package can also use robust regression (unpublished work) and integrated quantile regression (Wang et al. (2021) ). In each case, the microbiome community effect is modeled nonparametrically through a kernel function, which can incorporate phylogenetic tree information.