Fig. 3

Examples of alpha and beta diversity plots from the results on the CAMI II mouse gut dataset. a Shannon equitability at different taxonomic ranks as a measure of alpha diversity. The closer the Shannon equitability of the predicted profile by a method to the gold standard, the better it reflects the actual alpha diversity in the gold standard in terms of evenness of the taxa abundances. b–h Scatter plots of Bray-Curtis distances visualizing beta diversity at the species level. For each profiling method and plot, a point corresponds to the Bray-Curtis distance between the abundance predictions for a pair of input samples by the method (x-axis) and the Bray-Curtis distance computed for the gold standard for the same pair of samples (y-axis). The closer a point is to the line x=y, the more similar the predicted taxa distributions are to the gold standard