Fig. 5

Comparison of the β diversity of the intestinal flora in the two groups of patients. PCoA principal coordinate analysis. During PCoA sorting, other distance/non-similarity matrices can be selected, and thus, the interrelationships between objects can be represented in two-dimensional coordinates. NMDS non-metric multidimensional scale analysis. This differs in that NMDS is no longer a characteristic root sorting technique and no longer aims to sort the bearings to load more variance; therefore, NMDS-sorted graphs can be arbitrarily rotated, centred and inverted. With the same number of axes, NMDS tends to obtain relationships between objects with less distortion than PCoA. The results of an NMDS analysis are measured by stress, which is generally considered to be represented by a two-dimensional point plot of NMDS when stress < 0.2 and its graph has some interpretative significance. When stress < 0.1, it can be considered a good ranking; when stress < 0.05, it is well-represented