mbImpute: an accurate and robust imputation method for microbiome data

A critical challenge in microbiome data analysis is the existence of many non-biological zeros, which distort taxon abundance distributions, complicate data analysis, and jeopardize the reliability of scientific discoveries. To address this issue, we propose the first imputation method for microbiome data—mbImpute—to identify and recover likely non-biological zeros by borrowing information jointly from similar samples, similar taxa, and optional metadata including sample covariates and taxon phylogeny. We demonstrate that mbImpute improves the power of identifying disease-related taxa from microbiome data of type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer, and mbImpute preserves non-zero distributions of taxa abundances. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1186/s13059-021-02400-4).