Published in

Elsevier, Journal of Theoretical Biology, (352), p. 60-70, 2014

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.02.031

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Phylogenetic analysis accounting for age-dependent death and sampling with applications to epidemics

Journal article published in 2014 by Amaury Lambert ORCID, Helen K. Alexander, Tanja Stadler ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Orange circle
Postprint: archiving restricted
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The reconstruction of phylogenetic trees based on viral genetic sequence data sequentially sampled from an epidemic provides estimates of the past transmission dynamics, by fitting epidemiological models to these trees. To our knowledge, none of the epidemiological models currently used in phylogenetics can account for recovery rates and sampling rates dependent on the time elapsed since transmission. Here we introduce an epidemiological model where infectives leave the epidemic, either by recovery or sampling, after some random time which may follow an arbitrary distribution. We derive an expression for the likelihood of the phylogenetic tree of sampled infectives under our general epidemiological model. The analytic concept developed in this paper will facilitate inference of past epidemiological dynamics and provide an analytical framework for performing very efficient simulations of phylogenetic trees under our model. The main idea of our analytic study is that the non-Markovian epidemiological model giving rise to phylogenetic trees growing vertically as time goes by, can be represented by a Markovian "coalescent point process" growing horizontally by the sequential addition of pairs of coalescence and sampling times. As examples, we discuss two special cases of our general model, namely an application to influenza and an application to HIV. Though phrased in epidemiological terms, our framework can also be used for instance to fit macroevolutionary models to phylogenies of extant and extinct species, accounting for general species lifetime distributions. ; Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures