Scatter plots interpretation

Hello, I am trying to interpreet these scatter plots that I have generated. These are specific taxa associated with ultraprocessed food consumption. Can anyone help me to understand it? why there are some sort of clusters?


Hi @Alessandro_Atzeni,

Thanks for the question! Can you give us some more details? In particular, it would be good to know which transformation and normalization methods you are using.

Best,
Kelsey

Hi @Kelsey_Thompson I am not doing any transformation, just CLR normalization of counts.
Cheers
Alex

Hi Alex,

My intuition here is that this is a property of the underlying data. When MaAsLin plots the data it is the raw data that was supplied - not what the model is seeing (e.g. before MaAsLin may normalize or transform the data - depending on your settings). I’m happy to dig further if you can provide a minimally reproducible example - but I believe the two clusters are just for high abundant and low abundant samples of these microbes.

I hope this helps!
Best,
Kelsey