MANIEA: a microbial association network inference method based on improved Eclat association rule mining algorithm.

Motivation: Modeling microbiome systems as complex networks are known as the problem of network inference. Microbial association network inference is of great significance in applications on clinical diagnosis, disease treatment, pathological analysis, etc. However, most current network inference methods focus on mining strong pairwise associations between microorganisms, which is defective in reflecting the comprehensive interactive patterns participated by multiple microorganisms.