https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-02055-3
Regular Article
Inference of epidemic networks: the effect of different data types
1
School of Mathematics and Statistics and Centre for Complex System, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
2
Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology-Public Health, Westmead Hospital, Westmead, NSW, Australia
3
Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute, Faculty of Medicine and Health, Westmead, NSW, Australia
a
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Received:
29
June
2025
Accepted:
29
October
2025
Published online:
14
November
2025
Abstract
We investigate how the properties of epidemic networks change depending on the availability of different types of data on a disease outbreak. This is achieved by introducing mathematical and computational methods that estimate the probability of transmission trees by combining generative models that jointly determine the number of infected hosts, the probability of infection between them depending on location and genetic information, and their time of infection and sampling. We introduce a suitable Markov Chain Monte Carlo method that we show to sample trees according to their probability. Statistics performed over the sampled trees lead to probabilistic estimations of network properties and other quantities of interest, such as the number of unobserved hosts and the depth of the infection tree. We confirm the validity of our approach by comparing the numerical results with analytically solvable examples. Finally, we apply our methodology to data from COVID-19 in Australia. We find that network properties that are important for the management of the outbreak depend sensitively on the type of data used in the inference.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
