Fig. 2

\({\varvec{\beta}}\) coefficients returned from GLLVM procedure for covariates considered in this study by considering top 100 most abundant genera incorporating both continuous as well as categorical labelling of samples. Those coefficients which are positively associated with the microbial abundance of a particular species are represented in red colour whilst those that are negatively associated are represented with blue colour, respectively. Where the coefficients are non-significant, i.e., the 95% confidence interval crosses the 0 boundary, they are greyed out. Since the collation of ASVs was performed at Genus level, all those ASVs that cannot be categorized based on taxonomy are collated under “__Unknowns__” category. The acronyms are as follows: (ICT Islamabad Capital Territory, AJK Azad Jammu & Kashmir, KPK Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, LC Lower Class, LMC Lower Middle Class, MC Middle Class, UMC Upper Middle Class). Note that the GLLVM procedure additionally calculates the residual covariance matrix of the latent variables in the model which gives an additional co-occurrence relationship between microbes, and is given in Additional file 1: Fig. S47