Markov genealogy processes

Abstract

We construct a family of genealogy-valued Markov processes that are induced by a continuous-time Markov population process. We derive exact expressions for the likelihood of a given genealogy conditional on the history of the underlying population process. These lead to a nonlinear filtering equation which can be used to design efficient Monte Carlo inference algorithms. We demonstrate these calculations with several examples. Existing full-information approaches for phylodynamic inference are special cases of the theory.

Keywords: Hidden Markov model; Molecular epidemiology; Partially observed Markov process; Phylodynamics; Phylogeny; Statistical inference.