Apologies in advance for the very basic question, but I am currently analyzing data using the q2fmt plugin and I have never conducted the distance to baseline test so am uncertain regarding what the test performs – I would be grateful for any elucidation that can be provided if you have time!
My interpretation is that the test takes the beta diversity metric of interest eg. Jaccard and converts the distance to a proportion from each individual subject’s baseline, such that 0 is baseline for each individual subject. Thus, a 0.8 shift is a 80% shift away from baseline? Is this correct?
This is a great question! And your interpretation is really close.
Those distances aren’t being turned into proportions with this method, just comparing the values of the particular diversity metric of interest at each timepoint compared with the values at the specified ‘baseline timepoint’ (in the case of this example viz, that baseline timepoint would be 0).
That’s correct! Each timepoint (on the y-axis) shows the distribution of the distance to baseline for the relevant diversity metric (in this case, Jaccard).
Hope this helps! Let us know if you need any further clarification
That makes so much more sense – I had forgotten that Jaccard distance is only from 0 - 1, and had thought that a transformation had occurred to maintain the 0 -1 boundary, but this makes perfect sense now.
