Inference for nonlinear epidemiological models using genealogies and time series
File(s)
Author(s)
Rasmussen, DA
Ratmann, O
Koelle, K
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Phylodynamics - the field aiming to quantitatively integrate the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of rapidly evolving populations like those of RNA viruses – increasingly relies upon coalescent approaches to infer past population dynamics from reconstructed genealogies. As sequence data have become more abundant, these approaches are beginning to be used on populations undergoing rapid and rather complex dynamics. In such cases, the simple demographic models that current phylodynamic methods employ can be limiting. First, these models are not ideal for yielding biological insight into the processes that drive the dynamics of the populations of interest. Second, these models differ in form from mechanistic and often stochastic population dynamic models that are currently widely used when fitting models to time series data. As such, their use does not allow for both genealogical data and time series data to be considered in tandem when conducting inference. Here, we present a flexible statistical framework for phylodynamic inference that goes beyond these current limitations. The framework we present employs a recently developed method known as particle MCMC to fit stochastic, nonlinear mechanistic models for complex population dynamics to gene genealogies and time series data in a Bayesian framework. We demonstrate our approach using a nonlinear Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model for the transmission dynamics of an infectious disease and show through simulations that it provides accurate estimates of past disease dynamics and key epidemiological parameters from genealogies with or without accompanying time series data.
Date Issued
2011-08-25
Date Acceptance
2011-06-20
Citation
PLOS Computational Biology, 2011, 7 (8)
ISSN
1553-734X
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Journal / Book Title
PLOS Computational Biology
Volume
7
Issue
8
Copyright Statement
© 2011 Rasmussen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Sponsor
Wellcome Trust
Grant Number
092311/Z/10/Z
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Biochemical Research Methods
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
BIOCHEMICAL RESEARCH METHODS
MATHEMATICAL & COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
MONTE-CARLO METHODS
BAYESIAN-INFERENCE
POPULATION-DYNAMICS
CHILDHOOD DISEASES
COALESCENT
SEQUENCES
HISTORY
VIRUS
TRANSMISSION
EPIDEMICS
Algorithms
Bayes Theorem
Computational Biology
Disease Transmission, Infectious
Epidemics
Epidemiologic Methods
Models, Biological
Monte Carlo Method
Nonlinear Dynamics
Phylogeny
Population Dynamics
Prevalence
Stochastic Processes
Bioinformatics
06 Biological Sciences
08 Information And Computing Sciences
01 Mathematical Sciences
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e1002136