Fig. 5

mbImpute improves the similarity of taxon-taxon correlations between 16S and WGS data of microbiomes in healthy human stool samples. Four Pearson correlation matrices are calculated based on a common set of genus-level taxa’s abundances in 16S and WGS data, with or without using mbImpute as a preceding step. Before imputation, the Pearson correlation between the two correlation matrices is 0.59, and this correlation increases to 0.64 after imputation. For illustration purposes, each heatmap shows square roots of Pearson correlations, with the bottom 40% of values truncated to 0. The magenta, green, and purple squares highlight three taxon groups, each of which contains strongly correlated taxa and is consistent between the 16S and WGS data after imputation