FishTaco

FishTaco is a novel statistical and computational framework that aims to decompose functional shifts observed in a comparative analysis into individual taxon-level contributions. It relies on a permutation-based approach and carefully designed normalization and scaling schemes to preserve overall community taxonomic characteristics and to account not only for variation induced by each taxon but also for the way this variation correlates with community-wide context. Moreover, it can incorporate any desired shift-metric and is thereby applicable to a wide array of metagenomic comparative analyses. FishTaco further employs a sophisticated game-theory mathematical technique to account for inter-species non-linear dependencies and to optimally estimate the contribution of each taxon.