Assessment of overlap of phylogenetic transmission clusters and communities in simple sexual contact networks: Applications to HIV-1. PLoS ONE
Villandre et al. explored through simulations the association between communities and the epidemic spread of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs). The analyses revealed modest mean correspondence between communities in graphs and phylogenetic transmission clusters as the currently widely-used phylogenetic clustering methods often fail to recover sexual contact network communities reliably. The main drawback of these common methods is that the requirement that network communities correspond to clades in the phylogeny is rarely-fulfilled.
The authors conclude that community structure cannot be inferred reliably using the existing phylogenetic clustering tools. This work stresses the need for new clustering algorithms that focus on community recovery.