# How to interpret ANCOM results

**URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/how-to-interpret-ancom-results/1958
**Category:** User Support
**Tags:** ancom
**Created:** [November 23, 2017, 8:40pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/how-to-interpret-ancom-results/1958 "2017-11-23T20:40:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![mortonjt](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/mortonjt/32/3488_2.png) [@mortonjt](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/mortonjt)
#### Post date: [November 27, 2017, 6:27pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/how-to-interpret-ancom-results/1958/3 "2017-11-27T18:27:21Z")

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For the second question - not quite. Here is an explanation of the [percentiles](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/interpreting-values-from-an-ancom-percentile-abundance-table/1497/14). Note that there are pseudocounts, so all of the counts in the percentiles are off by one.

For the volcano plot, you are looking at the W statistic on the y-axis, and the F-score on the x-axis. So basically the x-axis is summarizing the effect size difference of the given species between your treatment groups, and the y-axis is the strength of the ANCOM test statistic that @colinbrislawn linked.

What you want to get out of this sort of plot are the ASVs with a high F-score and a high W-statistic -- in other words points that are close to the the top right corner. These indicate that an ASV is suspected to be truly different across the groups.

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