ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.

<h4>Motivation</h4>Estimation of bacterial community composition from high-throughput sequenced 16S rRNA gene amplicons is a key task in microbial ecology. Since the sequence data from each sample typically consist of a large number of reads and are adversely impacted by different levels...

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Main Authors: David Koslicki, Saikat Chatterjee, Damon Shahrivar, Alan W Walker, Suzanna C Francis, Louise J Fraser, Mikko Vehkaperä, Yueheng Lan, Jukka Corander
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2015-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140644
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author David Koslicki
Saikat Chatterjee
Damon Shahrivar
Alan W Walker
Suzanna C Francis
Louise J Fraser
Mikko Vehkaperä
Yueheng Lan
Jukka Corander
author_facet David Koslicki
Saikat Chatterjee
Damon Shahrivar
Alan W Walker
Suzanna C Francis
Louise J Fraser
Mikko Vehkaperä
Yueheng Lan
Jukka Corander
author_sort David Koslicki
collection DOAJ
description <h4>Motivation</h4>Estimation of bacterial community composition from high-throughput sequenced 16S rRNA gene amplicons is a key task in microbial ecology. Since the sequence data from each sample typically consist of a large number of reads and are adversely impacted by different levels of biological and technical noise, accurate analysis of such large datasets is challenging.<h4>Results</h4>There has been a recent surge of interest in using compressed sensing inspired and convex-optimization based methods to solve the estimation problem for bacterial community composition. These methods typically rely on summarizing the sequence data by frequencies of low-order k-mers and matching this information statistically with a taxonomically structured database. Here we show that the accuracy of the resulting community composition estimates can be substantially improved by aggregating the reads from a sample with an unsupervised machine learning approach prior to the estimation phase. The aggregation of reads is a pre-processing approach where we use a standard K-means clustering algorithm that partitions a large set of reads into subsets with reasonable computational cost to provide several vectors of first order statistics instead of only single statistical summarization in terms of k-mer frequencies. The output of the clustering is then processed further to obtain the final estimate for each sample. The resulting method is called Aggregation of Reads by K-means (ARK), and it is based on a statistical argument via mixture density formulation. ARK is found to improve the fidelity and robustness of several recently introduced methods, with only a modest increase in computational complexity.<h4>Availability</h4>An open source, platform-independent implementation of the method in the Julia programming language is freely available at https://github.com/dkoslicki/ARK. A Matlab implementation is available at http://www.ee.kth.se/ctsoftware.
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spelling doaj-art-d0e8caa4c0b744dfbd0a80f1b1ed8ade2025-08-20T02:34:12ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032015-01-011010e014064410.1371/journal.pone.0140644ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.David KoslickiSaikat ChatterjeeDamon ShahrivarAlan W WalkerSuzanna C FrancisLouise J FraserMikko VehkaperäYueheng LanJukka Corander<h4>Motivation</h4>Estimation of bacterial community composition from high-throughput sequenced 16S rRNA gene amplicons is a key task in microbial ecology. Since the sequence data from each sample typically consist of a large number of reads and are adversely impacted by different levels of biological and technical noise, accurate analysis of such large datasets is challenging.<h4>Results</h4>There has been a recent surge of interest in using compressed sensing inspired and convex-optimization based methods to solve the estimation problem for bacterial community composition. These methods typically rely on summarizing the sequence data by frequencies of low-order k-mers and matching this information statistically with a taxonomically structured database. Here we show that the accuracy of the resulting community composition estimates can be substantially improved by aggregating the reads from a sample with an unsupervised machine learning approach prior to the estimation phase. The aggregation of reads is a pre-processing approach where we use a standard K-means clustering algorithm that partitions a large set of reads into subsets with reasonable computational cost to provide several vectors of first order statistics instead of only single statistical summarization in terms of k-mer frequencies. The output of the clustering is then processed further to obtain the final estimate for each sample. The resulting method is called Aggregation of Reads by K-means (ARK), and it is based on a statistical argument via mixture density formulation. ARK is found to improve the fidelity and robustness of several recently introduced methods, with only a modest increase in computational complexity.<h4>Availability</h4>An open source, platform-independent implementation of the method in the Julia programming language is freely available at https://github.com/dkoslicki/ARK. A Matlab implementation is available at http://www.ee.kth.se/ctsoftware.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140644
spellingShingle David Koslicki
Saikat Chatterjee
Damon Shahrivar
Alan W Walker
Suzanna C Francis
Louise J Fraser
Mikko Vehkaperä
Yueheng Lan
Jukka Corander
ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.
PLoS ONE
title ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.
title_full ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.
title_fullStr ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.
title_full_unstemmed ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.
title_short ARK: Aggregation of Reads by K-Means for Estimation of Bacterial Community Composition.
title_sort ark aggregation of reads by k means for estimation of bacterial community composition
url https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140644
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