Are there phyla, classes, genera etc. that are associated with increasing disease status? Not sure if this can be sensibly done..

[alicemchardy]

• for most probes there is no numeric scale on increasing disease status
• samples have been labeled by Goeser as 1,2,3 for increasing liver disease (not really great data for trend analysis, can look for differences between groups, and see if a differnce increases from healthy in comparison to second worst and healthy to worst group (which ones these are Dr. Goeser knows).

[philippmuench]

Spearmans rho can be used for ordinal scaled data