I still didn’t manage to find a way of looking at 2 categories at a time to get the proportion plots for gneiss. If I filter the feature table so that I am left with two categories, wouldn’t that also affect the balances calculated (compared to the balances calculated for the complete feature table where all categories are present)? That means I would have to run gneiss for each pair of category within a level. Wouldn’t this inflate the results because of multiple testing?
@Alex_14262, there may be some confusion with raw visualization and statistical tests. Constructing multiple plots should not affect the outcome of the statistical test, and you should be able to feed in filtered tables and metadata directly into balance-taxonomy
That being said, if you find yourself doing a substantial amount of manual manipulation of the metadata / tables to generate these sorts of plots, may be worthwhile thinking about building some scripts. It maybe easier to export the feature tables and plot the proportion plots directly Python (see proportion_plots function).
The problem is I have tried filtering the composition table (which is used in qiime gneiss balance-taxonomy command), but I cannot use the command qiime feature-table filter-samples and filter based on metadata categories because it is not of FeatureTable[Frequency] type, but FeatureTable[composition] type, which implies I need to filter it before adding a pseudocount, so before the balances are computed. Thus I would need to run the whole analysis every time, for each pair of categories. Please correct me if I am wrong and there is an alternative method
Also, I don’t have knowledge of Python, and the turnaround for my project is quite short, so I am limited to qiime.