Understanding Gneiss - questions regarding the analysis

Hello

I have run the tutorial on gneiss and been trying to do the analysis on my own dataset, but got some basic questions about this analysis, as I don't fully understand it.

  1. I am not sure I fully understand what question this analysis is trying to answer. I thought it was testing which of the factors of interest influence the relative abundance of species in samples. So essentially it's like running a multiple regression?

  2. Following up on the previous question, what is the null hypothesis?

  3. I guess the main chunk of the analysis is a multiple regression. However, there are no p-values/F-scores/degrees of freedom, so how does one know which variable to keep in the model and which to omit? Also, what test statistics would you one quote in a paper?

  4. How does one interpret the prediction and residual plots? I don't really understand the relevance of a scatter plot between the first two balances, and then what I should expect to see in those plots. Also, what do the percentages in brackets represent?

  5. Finally, is the tree presented in the analysis representative of how the taxa are phylogenetically connected?

Thanks

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