Ecological Hierarchies of Tumor Immune Assembly and ICI Resistance

This registration contains a pre-specified analysis plan for evaluating whether resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) is organized into distinct ecological levels across tumor types. The full plan is provided in the attached PDF. In brief, three ecological levels are pre-defined—composition-dominated, global-assembly-dominated, and higher-order-boundary-dominated—with objective rules for assigning each cohort to a level using spatial cell distributions and null-model diagnostics, independently of ICI outcomes. The plan pre-defines beta diversity, Deterministic Assembly Strength (DAS), Immune Segregation Index (ISI), and Normalized Stochasticity Ratio (NST) under count-preserving toroidal-shift null models, and tests cross-platform and cross-cancer reproducibility of the level assignments and the incremental predictive value of assembly statistics beyond cell abundance.