How does MicrobiomeAnalyst deal with one-to-many mapping from KO to different functional categories (functional diversity profiling)?

MicrobiomeAnalyst offers three different approaches for computing the abundance of higher functional categories, including:

  • Total hits: simply sum all the hits belong to each category. For KOs belonging to multiple groups, they will be counted multiple times;
  • Total hits normalized by category size: same as above, with each sum further normalized by the size of the category.
  • Sum of the weighted hits: the weight of a unique group member is 1; for those belonging to n groups, their weighted will be 1/n (i.e. distributing hits equally to those groups)