Hello,
I examine the significance of differences in taxa composition between two groups using the ANCOM package.
I would like to make a bar plot for p-values calculated by ANCOM.
I know that the current ANCOM does not provide p-values, so I am wondering if I could use the mean of p-values across sub-nullhypotheses as well as calculating the W value by counting the number of rejecting sub-nullhypotheses.
Is it reasonable? Could anyone give me suggestions?
Hey @ohmiyajohn,
What’s your motivation in using p-values as opposed to the W statistic, it’s self?
Best,
Justine
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Hello Justine,
When illustrating results of the significance test in our paper, it is hard a little bit to understand plots for the W value instead of p-values because the W value is specific to ANCOM.
To facilitate understanding the result for readers and reviewers, I would like to use p-values.
Actually, some people are asking on this site what the W value means.
Best regards,
Ohmiyajohn
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Hi @ohmiyajohn,
Fair point. I’m on a one-woman crusade to joust at the windmill of “larger p-value means larger effect size”. And just for better effect size measurements in general in microbiome data.
There is functionally no p-value for ANCOM. The W statistic essentially measures how many of the feature ratios are significantly different a the p-threshhold. So, if A/B is significantly different between your groups, but A/C … A/Z are not, then A gets a W statistic of 1. If B/C … B/Z is significantly different, B gets a W score of 25, and so-on. At the end, the test sums the significant ratios. But, you’re back to the problem that you’re working with the p-threshhold verses an actual p-value for the taxa test set. Which gets back to the fact that the W statistic is a more accurate representation of the probability of finding a significant difference in abundance between the two groups.
At one point, Shyamal Peddada, the last author of the original paper, said he was at least considering a pseudo p-value. But, this was maybe 2 or 3 years ago, and Im not sure about the status of the project vs expanding ANCOM to other tests.
Best,
Justine
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Although I mentioned that I could calculate mean of p-values in the first post, the median of p-values could be better than the mean if I use the p-values for the plot.
Hello Justine,
Thank you for your reply and straightforward explanation about the W and p-value in ANCOM.
I know that the W score is the best to evaluate the significance of difference between two groups, and ANCOM calculates multiple p-values for sub null hypotheses per one comparison.
I can modify the ANCOM code to calculate median or mean of p-values within the comparison, so my question is whether the median of p-values could be a pseudo p-value to depict our result.
Although, right now I am going to make two plots for the W statistics and median of p-values, I guess that my wet colleagues prefer that of p-values.
Bests,
Ohmiyajohn
Hi ohmiyajohn,
I think to modify the code you’d have to go into the original python repo in scikit-bio. That said, i think you’re probably better off with a median p-value than a mean, since it will be more resilient to extremes.
However, I think the use of p-values obfuscates the information from the test and people’s comfort with the value isn’t a good enough reason to coerce the data that way. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that a permutative p-value is limited by the number of permutations because of the way it’s calculated, but shouldn’t be a good motivation to repeat the test with increasingly large ns, rather than calculating an effect size. (Again, apologies, a quixotic one woman quest for effect sizes 
).
Best,
Justine
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Hi @ohmiyajohn,
Of possible interest, I just noticed through the ANCOM2 (R package only) documentation that they let you set a significance value (default 0.05) so it might be that in ANCOM2 you would be able to extract p values from your output. I haven’t tried personally to do this but might be worth a try?
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Hello Mehrbod Estaki,
Thank you for your suggestion.
Unfortunately, ANCOM2 does not seem to output p-values and only output the W values and taxa with significant difference.
The W values appear to be the number of rejected sub hypotheses, so I wonder if the W values divided by the number of all sub hypotheses could be used instead of p-values.
Best regards,
Ohmiyajohn
