Paper Info
Title
TreeFix-TP: Phylogenetic Error-Correction for Infectious Disease Transmission Network Inference
Abstract
Many existing methods for estimation of infectious disease transmission networks use a phylogeny of the infecting strains as the basis for transmission network inference, and accurate network inference relies on accuracy of this underlying evolutionary history. However, phylogenetic reconstruction can be highly error prone and more sophisticated methods can fail to scale to larger outbreaks, negatively impacting downstream transmission network inference. We introduce a new method, TreeFix-TP, for accurate and scalable reconstruction of transmission phylogenies based on an error-correction framework. Our method uses intrahost strain diversity and host information to balance a parsimonious evaluation of the implied transmission network with statistical hypothesis testing on sequence data likelihood. The reconstructed tree minimizes the number of required disease transmissions while being as well supported by sequence data as the maximum likelihood phylogeny. Using a simulation framework for viral transmission and evolution and real data from ten HCV outbreaks, we demonstrate that error-correction with TreeFix-TP improves phylogenetic accuracy and outbreak source detection. Our results show that using TreeFix-TP can lead to significant improvement in transmission phylogeny inference and that its performance is robust to variations in transmission and evolutionary parameters. TreeFix-TP is freely available opensource from https://compbio.engr.uconn.edu/software/treef ix-tp/.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1142/9789811232701_0012
PACIFIC SYMPOSIUM ON BICOMPUTING 2021
Keywords
DocType
Volume
phylogeny reconstruction, transmission network inference, infectious disease, computational epidemiology
Conference
26
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2335-6936
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Samuel Sledzieski100.34
Chengchen Zhang210.69
Ion I. Mandoiu300.68
Mukul S. Bansal429423.97