Fig. 1

The performance of detecting differentially abundant genes increases for large group sizes. For each method, the receiver operating characteristics curve shows the true positive rate (y-axis) and the false positive rate (x-axis) at each position in the gene ranking list. Panels a-c show results for the Qin dataset and panels d-f show results for the Yatsunenko dataset. Group sizes of 3 + 3, 6 + 6 and 10 + 10 were included in the comparison and the effect size was fixed at a fold-change of 5. Each curve is based 100 resampled metagenomes. The methods included are edgeR, DESeq2, the overdispersed generalized linear model (oGLM), metagenomeSeq (mSeq), metastats and voom (see Additional file 2: Figure S1 for the additional eight methods)