ABOUT
Challenge
Researchers often want to identify the most important features that relate to outcome values in scientific studies. However, there are many analytic challenges, including:
Lots of data and literature to understand, non-linear relationships, non-normal data distributions, how to handle both categorical and numerical variables, etc.
It is cumbersome to keep track of the analytics used for obtaining a set of interesting features.
Solution
EXPLANA (EXPLoratory ANAlysis) was developed to generate an interactive report containing figures and written descriptions of methods summarizing the feature selection process.
EXPLANA can identify unique features dependent on different contexts of change (for observational and interventional longitudinal study designs), including novel order-dependent categorical features.
It was designed for longitudinal microbiome studies, but works for cross-sectional studies too, and is broadly useful for various applications as a general feature selection tool.
