Fig. 3

Result comparisons of three simulated data sets with different levels of heterogeneity. The first row (a–c) shows the NMDS plot using the Bray-Curtis distance. The second row (d–f) shows the U-Curve of proportion of significant features. AOI is short for area of interest, which denotes the proportion of significant features out of all the features (area of green plus purple). AUMC is short for area under the mixing curve, which denotes the area under the U-Curve (area of purple). Slope denotes the slope of the red triangle. The red triangle denotes the real data. The third row (g–i) shows the fragility index. The height of each bar represents the Fragility Index value for a given feature. Each color denotes features that have the same levels of fragility. To save space, the legend listing the names of the 50 features are omitted