ArticlePLoS computational biology2015
Proportionality: a valid alternative to correlation for relative data.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 131 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
131 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Meta-analysis of microbiome association networks reveal patterns of dysbiosis in diseased microbiomes.Scientific reports · 2022Pooled it
- MNEMONIC: MetageNomic Experiment Mining to create an OTU Network of Inhabitant Correlations.BMC bioinformatics · 2019Pooled it
- The Association of Arsenic Metabolism with Cancer, Cardiovascular Disease, and Diabetes: A Systematic Review of the Epidemiological Evidence.Environmental health perspectives · 2017Pooled it
- Human gut microbiota is associated with HIV-reactive immunoglobulin at baseline and following HIV vaccination.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery of morbidly obese patients induces swift and persistent changes of the individual gut microbiota.Genome medicine · 2016Trial
- KDM6A loss enhances oxidative phosphorylation uncovering tissue-level convergent evolution.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Intravenously delivered multilineage-differentiating stress-enduring cells dampen hyperoxia-induced lung injury in a rat model with features of bronchopulmonary dysplasia.Stem cell research & therapy · 2026Article
- Proportionality-based association metrics in count compositional data.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2026Article
- A New Framework to Empower Ecosystem Assessment Through the Integration of eDNA Inventories, Graph Theory and Niche Modelling.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Inferring absolute counts from proportions by constraining multivariate normal distributions.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- rCCLasso: a robust framework for microbial correlation network analysis reveals age-related microbial dynamics.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Decoding the reproductive microbiome: enabling clinical and biological insights through machine and deep learning.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2026Review
- Compositional maturation of the microbiome and adaptive immunity in the postnatal period.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Article
- Impact of data compositionality on the detection of microbiota responses.Gut microbes · 2025Article
- Explicit Scale Simulation for analysis of RNA-sequencing count data with ALDEx2.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2025Article
- Microbial diversity and functional potential of the Halobates melleus (Heteroptera: Gerridae) microbiome from the Red Sea coastline.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Metabolic redundancy and specialisation of novel sulfide-oxidizing Sulfurimonas and Sulfurovum along the brine-seawater interface of the Kebrit Deep.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Variants and vaccines impact nasal immunity over three waves of SARS-CoV-2.Nature immunology · 2025Article
- Key features and guidelines for the application of microbial alpha diversity metrics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- ChIP-Rx: Arabidopsis Chromatin Profiling Using Quantitative ChIP-Seq.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2025Article
71 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In the life sciences, many measurement methods yield only the relative abundances of different components in a sample. With such relative-or compositional-data, differential expression needs careful interpretation, and correlation-a statistical workhorse for analyzing pairwise relationships-is an inappropriate measure of association. Using yeast gene expression data we show how correlation can be misleading and present proportionality as a valid alternative for relative data. We show how the strength of proportionality between two variables can be meaningfully and interpretably described by a new statistic ϕ which can be used instead of correlation as the basis of familiar analyses and visualisation methods, including co-expression networks and clustered heatmaps. While the main aim of this study is to present proportionality as a means to analyse relative data, it also raises intriguing questions about the molecular mechanisms underlying the proportional regulation of a range of yeast genes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.