Maaslin2 taxonomic hierarchy analysis

There’s debate in the literature on this. We’ve had a similar thread with some additional discussion on this point here.

Personally I think the main thing to account for is the dependence between taxonomic levels. A test for a species and a test for the genus that contains it will not be independent.

Apparently BH FDR correction is robust against this dependence for positive correlations, but nothing more general than that. Could taxonomic levels ever be negatively correlated? Off the top of my head I can’t imagine why that would happen, but I can’t rule it out either.

BY FDR correction (which you can use in Maaslin2 by setting correction = "BY") is apparently robust against any dependence structure. Without having tried it, I assume it’s correspondingly more conservative. If you try and find interesting distinctions against other methods, let us know.