multimedia: Multimodal Mediation Analysis of Microbiome Data

Abstract

Mediation analysis has emerged as a versatile tool for answering mechanistic questions in microbiome research because it provides a statistical framework for attributing treatment effects to alternative causal pathways. Using a series of linked regressions, this analysis quantifies how complementary data relate to one another and respond to treatments. Despite these advances, existing softwares rigid assumptions often result in users viewing mediation analysis as a black box. We designed the multimedia R package to make advanced mediation analysis techniques accessible, ensuring that statistical components are interpretable and adaptable. The package provides a uniform interface to direct and indirect effect estimation, synthetic null hypothesis testing, bootstrap confidence interval construction, and sensitivity analysis, enabling experimentation with various mediator and outcome models while maintaining a simple overall workflow. The software includes modules for regularized linear, compositional, random forest, hierarchical, and hurdle modeling, making it well-suited to microbiome data. We illustrate the package through two case studies. The first re-analyzes a study of the microbiome and metabolome of Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients, uncovering potential mechanistic interactions between the microbiome and disease-associated metabolites, not found in the original study. The second analyzes new data about the influence of mindfulness practice on the microbiome. The mediation analysis highlights shifts in taxa previously associated with depression that cannot be explained indirectly by diet or sleep behaviors alone. A gallery of examples and further documentation can be found at https://go.wisc.edu/830110. IMPORTANCEMicrobiome studies routinely gather complementary data to capture different aspects of a microbiomes response to a change, such as the introduction of a therapeutic. Mediation analysis clarifies the extent to which responses occur sequentially via mediators, thereby supporting causal, rather than purely descriptive, interpretation. multimedia is a modular R package with close ties to the wider microbiome software ecosystem that makes statistically rigorous, flexible mediation analysis easily accessible, setting the stage for precise and causally informed microbiome engineering.