Qiime diversity alpha-correlation

[Jewelna_Osei-Poku]

I am trying to analyse my results using the qiime diversity alpha-correlation. I am getting the error below about my metadata (which is the same one I have been using with the ‘Moving Pictures’ tutorials):
Plugin error from diversity:

Only non-numeric data is present in metadata file.

Can anyone help me solve this?

Thanks

[Nicholas_Bokulich]

Hi @Jewelna_Osei-Poku ,
Could you please post the exact command you are using and upload your metadata file so that I can debug this issue?

[Jewelna_Osei-Poku]

Thank you Nicholas for the response. Kindly find below the command I posted:

qiime diversity alpha-correlation --i-alpha-diversity core-metrics-results/evenness_vector.qza --m-metadata-file metagseqs_metadata.tsv --p-method spearman --output-dir alpha_correlation/

Attached is also the metadata file I have used throughout the analyses.

metagseqs_metadata.tsv (1.5 KB)

[Nicholas_Bokulich]

Hi @Jewelna_Osei-Poku,
Thank you for providing your metadata file and command. The alpha-correlation method correlates an alpha diversity metric with all numeric values in the input mapping file. The error that you receive occurs whenever no metadata columns containing exclusively numeric data are found in the mapping file. Your mapping file contains only categorical metadata, which is inappropriate for the alpha-correlation method. You should instead use the method alpha-group-significance to test for associations between metadata and alpha diversity.

Thank you,
Nicholas

[Jewelna_Osei-Poku]

That makes sense now. Thanks for the explanation.