Microbial Interaction Network Estimation via Bias-Corrected Graphical Lasso

With the increasing availability of microbiome 16S data, network estimation has become a useful approach to studying the interactions between microbial taxa. Network estimation on a set of variables is frequently explored using graphical models, in which the relationship between two variables is modeled via their conditional dependency given the other variables. Various methods for sparse inverse covariance estimation have been proposed to estimate graphical models in the high-dimensional setting, including graphical lasso. However, current methods do not address the compositional count nature of microbiome data, where abundances of microbial taxa are not directly measured, but are reflected by the observed counts in an error-prone manner. Adding to the challenge is that the sum of the counts within each sample, termed “sequencing depth,” is an experimental technicality that carries no biological information but can vary drastically across samples. To address these issues, we develop a new approach to network estimation, called BC-GLASSO (bias-corrected graphical lasso), which models the microbiome data using a logistic normal multinomial distribution with the sequencing depths explicitly incorporated, corrects the bias of the naive empirical covariance estimator arising from the heterogeneity in sequencing depths, and builds the inverse covariance estimator via graphical lasso. We demonstrate the advantage of BC-GLASSO over current approaches to microbial interaction network estimation under a variety of simulation scenarios. We also illustrate the efficacy of our method in an application to a human microbiome data set.