Fig. 1: Schematic of EMBED.

Dynamics of bacterial abundances within a community comprising three bacteria (left, red) is approximated using K = 2 ECNs \(\{{y}_{k}\left(t\right)\}\) and corresponding loadings \(\left\{{{\boldsymbol{\Phi }}}_{k}\right\}\) (middle). From the abundance data, EMBED identifies ECNs that are shared across subjects (right). The dynamics of abundances of individual bacteria are then approximated (green) using the inferred ECNs.