Table 2.

Summary of used configurations and received results testing the (s)PLS analyses

	Bidirectional (s)PLS
Datasets	16S & ITS vs. ITS & 16S		M & T vs. T & M
Filtered with	PCA	PLS-DA	PCA	PLS-DA
No. features after tuning	10 & 10 vs. 10 & 10	40 & 10 vs. 10 & 25	16 & 10 vs. 10 & 18	10 & 10 vs. 10 & 10
No. pre-selected components	4	4	4	4
Ideal no. components	1	1	1	1
Tuning runtime (min)	10	2	2	1

(s)PLS was performed with two omics dataset pairs. One pair was formed from the two microbiomics datasets (16S and ITS), and the second was composed of the transcriptomic (T) and metabolomic (M) datasets. Both pairwise analyses were done bidirectionally