What is the nice way to interpret phylogenetic gneiss?

Not quite - if there are a ton of zeros, the result will be quite biased already (changes in low abundance taxa could really throw off the balance calculations). So I wouldn't trust the coefficients / pvalues coming out of balances that were computed from many low abundance taxa.

That has been proposed before

And that is a totally fine approach - its just balance-taxonomy won't be available, since it won't work on a collapsed table. So if you go this route, you'll need to do your own processing offline via R / Python

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