Tom Britton: Statistical inference for epidemics: what is gained by observing the virus phylogeny?

Abstract: The last decades, traditional epidemic outbreak data has been complemented with virus sequences of notified cases. These virus sequences can, together with evolutionary models for the virus, be employed to reconstruct the virus phylogeny of the notified cases. And, knowing the phylogeny may help in inferring the underlying transmission tree. In the talk we describe simple versions of these methodologies, and discuss situations where the sequences thus may improve estimation precision, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, situations where the sequences contribute little or nothing for estimation precision. This is work in progress together with F Giardina.