zitools

zitools enables zero-inflated count data analysis by down-weighting excess zeros or replacing an appropriate proportion of excess zeros with NA, facilitating downstream analyses of overdispersed, zero-inflated data such as microbiome data in a less biased manner.

Key Features:

• Zero-Inflated Data Handling: Down-weights excess zeros or replaces an appropriate proportion of excess zeros with NA.
• Statistical Function Overloading: Overloads frequently used statistical functions including mean, median, and standard deviation for zero-inflated data.
• Plotting Function Overloading: Overloads plotting functions including boxplots and heatmaps for zero-inflated data.
• Differential Abundance Test Overloading: Overloads differential abundance tests for zero-inflated data.

Scientific Applications:

• Microbiome Analysis: Addresses the challenge of analyzing overdispersed and zero-inflated microbiome data.

Methodology:

The tool implements two approaches for handling excess zeros: down-weighting or replacement with NA, and extends this through function overloading of standard statistical, plotting, and differential abundance methods.