Using metagenomics to detect the global structure of microbial community remains a significant challenge. The structure of a microbial community and its functions are complicated not only because of the complex interactions among microbes but also their complicate interacting with confounding environmental factors. Recently dimension reduction methods such as Principle component analysis, Non-negative matrix factorization and Canonical correlation analysis have been employed extensively to investigate the complex structure embedded in metagenomic profiles which summarize the abundance of funct...
