Based on presence/absence or quantitative microbiomics abundance data, microbial networks can be built to capture ecological relationships between species. For example, pairwise relationships can be analyzed by assessing the similarity in co-occurrence of different microbial species across multiple biological samples, and a network of statistically significant pairwise relationships can then be constructed. Alternatively, more complex relationships between the abundance of multiple microbial species can be determined with regression or association rule mining approaches.
