Comparing Mycobacterium tuberculosis transmission reconstruction models from whole genome sequence data

Genomic epidemiology is routinely used worldwide to interrogate infectious disease dynamics. Multiple computational tools exist that reconstruct transmission networks by coupling genomic data with epidemiological models. Resulting inferences can improve our understanding of pathogen transmission dynamics, and yet the performance of these tools has not been evaluated for tuberculosis (TB), a disease process with complex epidemiology including variable latency and within-host heterogeneity. Here, we performed a systematic comparison of six publicly available transmission reconstruction models, evaluating their accuracy when predicting transmission events in simulated and real-world Mycobacterium tuberculosis outbreaks. We observed variability in the number of transmission links that were predicted with high probability (P ≥ 0.5) and low accuracy of these predictions against known transmission in simulated outbreaks. We also found a low proportion of epidemiologically supported case-contact pairs were identified in our real-world TB clusters. The specificity of all models was high, and a relatively high proportion of the total transmission events predicted by some models were true links, notably with TransPhylo, Outbreaker2, and Phybreak. Our findings may inform the choice of tools in TB transmission analyses and underscore the need for caution when interpreting transmission networks produced using probabilistic approaches.