PrioriTree: a utility for improving phylodynamic analyses in BEAST

Bioinformatics. 2023 Jan 1;39(1):btac849. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac849.

Abstract

Summary: Phylodynamic methods are central to studies of the geographic and demographic history of disease outbreaks. Inference under discrete-geographic phylodynamic models-which involve many parameters that must be inferred from minimal information-is inherently sensitive to our prior beliefs about the model parameters. We present an interactive utility, PrioriTree, to help researchers identify and accommodate prior sensitivity in discrete-geographic inferences. Specifically, PrioriTree provides a suite of functions to generate input files for-and summarize output from-BEAST analyses for performing robust Bayesian inference, data-cloning analyses and assessing the relative and absolute fit of candidate discrete-geographic (prior) models to empirical datasets.

Availability and implementation: PrioriTree is distributed as an R package available at https://github.com/jsigao/prioritree, with a comprehensive user manual provided at https://bookdown.org/jsigao/prioritree_manual/.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Bayes Theorem
  • Disease Outbreaks*
  • Software*