DENcode: A model for haplotype-informed transmission probability of dengue virus

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by Sachith Maduranga, Braulio Mark Valencia, Chathurani Sigera, Praveen Weeratunga, Deepika Fernando, Senaka Rajapakse, Andrew R. Lloyd, Rowena A. Bull, Haley Stone, Chaturaka RodrigoDengue virus transmission networks are often only partially resolved, due to gaps in sampling, unobserved mosquito-mediated transmission, and using methods (phylogenetics) that describe evolutionary relatedness but not explicit, probabilistic transmission links between individual infections. We developed DENcode, a framework to estimate the relative likelihood of vector-mediated transmission between pairs of dengue cases by combining a temperature- and time-modulated epidemiological kernel, which captures the extrinsic incubation period and human infectiousness, with a phylogenetically informed genetic similarity kernel derived from patristic distances between viral haplotypes or consensus sequences. Validation with a real-life dataset of 90 dengue infections sampled from Colombo, Sri Lanka between 2017 – 2020 and sequenced to resolve within-host haplotypes, DENcode estimates were stable across 100 Monte Carlo iterations, yielding narrow credible intervals (median width