Taxon Set Enrichment Analysis (TSEA) aims to identify biologically or ecologically meaningful patterns in taxonomy composition changes in microbiome studies. TSEA directly investigates if a group of taxa (sharing common traits or functions) are significantly enriched. MicrobiomeAnalyst uses hypergeometric test to evaluate if certain taxon sets are represented more often than expected by chance within a user uploaded lists of taxa.
Essentially, TSEA is a taxonomic version of Gene Set Enrichment Analysis approach, with its own collection of taxon set libraries.