Context-aware dimensionality reduction deconvolutes gut microbial community dynamics

The translational power of human microbiome studies is limited by high inter-individual variation. We describe a dimensionality reduction tool, compositional tensor factorization (CTF), that incorporates information from the same host, across multiple samples, to reveal patterns driving differences in microbial composition across phenotypes. CTF identifies robust patterns in sparse, compositional datasets, allowing for the detection of microbial changes associated with specific phenotypes that are reproducible across datasets.