Quantifying compositional variability in microbial communities with FAVA.

Studies of microbial community composition across time, space, or biological replicates often rely on summary statistics that analyze just one or two samples at a time. Although these statistics effectively summarize the diversity of one sample or the compositional dissimilarity between two samples, they are ill-suited for measuring variability across many samples at once. Measuring compositional variability among many samples is key to understanding the temporal stability of a community across multiple time points, or the heterogeneity of microbiome composition across multiple experimental replicates or host individuals. Our proposed measure, FAVA, meets the need for a statistic summarizing compositional variability across many microbiome samples all at once.