PhyloRelief

PhyloRelief implements an algorithm that introduces the Relief strategy of feature weighting in a phylogenetic context to identify those OTUs or groups of OTUs that are correlated for the differentiation between classes of samples (i.e. healthy vs. disease, lean vs. obese etc.) in a metagenomic dataset. By integrating the phylogenetic relationships amongst taxa into the framework of statistical learning, the method is able to unambiguously group the taxa into lineages without relying on a precompiled taxonomy, and accomplishes a ranking of the lineages according to their contribution to the sample differentiation.