fastEmu

fastEmu is an R package for estimating changes in the abundance of microbial categories (taxa, genes, etc.) associated with covariates using high throughput sequencing data. fastEmu is a wrapper for the package radEmu that implements a fast version of the hypothesis testing procedure implemented in radEmu.

Check out radEmu for a full list of reasons to use this method for your differential abundance analysis. Some highlights include:

• radEmu uses high throughput sequencing data to estimate changes in the “absolute abundance” of categories
• radEmu doesn’t require data transformations, a reference taxon, or pseudocounts
• radEmu is robust to differential sampling depths and differential detection of categories (taxa, genes, etc.)
• radEmu has great error control, including in small samples and data generated from different distributions

However, hypothesis testing in radEmu can be slow, especially when there is a large number of categories. This is why we created fastEmu! fastEmu uses a simplified model to test the same parameters* tested in radEmu, but much faster.

What parameters are we testing exactly?

*We don’t estimate exactly the same parameters as in radEmu. In radEmu, we estimate the log fold difference in abundance associated with the covariate for each category relative to the typical log fold difference in abundance associated with the covariate across all categories. This lets us pick out the categories that are the most differentially abundant compared to the overall set of categories. In fastEmu, we cannot compare to the typical log fold difference all categories, because we need to reduce the size of our model in order to run it quickly. Instead, we compare to the typical log fold difference in a reference set of categories. The smaller the set, the faster the test will run.

You can either choose the reference set yourself (if you have a set of categories whose abundance you think varies little across covariate levels) or fastEmu can choose a data-driven reference set. This data-driven reference set is made up of the categories with the smallest estimated expected log fold difference across covariate levels relative to the typical log fold difference across the entire dataset. This means that the approximate median log fold difference within the reference set is very similar to the approximate median log fold difference within the full set of categories.

Installation

To download fastEmu, use the code below.

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("statdivlab/fastEmu")
library(radEmu)

Use

The vignettes demonstrate example usage of the main functions. Please file an issue if you have a request for a tutorial that is not currently included.

The following code will run fastEmu to estimate log fold differences in abundance for all categories in Y in comparison to the typical log fold difference in a data-driven reference set of categories (this parameter is nearly the same as the one estimated in radEmu). This code will then quickly run a robust score test for the hypothesis that the $5\text{th}$ category has a log fold difference in abundance associated with the treatment that is different than the typical log fold difference associated with the treatment across categories in the reference set.

emu_test <- fastEmuFit(formula = ~ treatment,
                       data = sample_data, 
                       Y = count_data,
                       test_kj = data.frame(k = 2, j = 5),
                       reference_set = "data_driven")

Documentation

We additionally have a pkgdown website that contains pre-built versions of our function documentation and a vignette.

Citation

If you use fastEmu for your analysis, check back in soon for a preprint!

Bug Reports / Change Requests

If you encounter a bug or would like make a change request, please file it as an issue here.

If you’re a developer, we would love to review your pull requests.