Craft: A Machine Learning Approach to Dengue Subtyping

MotivationThe dengue virus poses a major global health threat, with nearly 390 million infections annually. A recently proposed hierarchical dengue nomenclature system enhances spatial resolution by defining major and minor lineages within genotypes, aiding efforts to track viral evolution. While current subtyping tools - Genome Detective, GLUE, and NextClade - rely on computationally intensive sequence alignment and phylogenetic inference, machine learning presents a promising alternative for achieving accurate and rapid classification. ResultsWe present Craft (Chaos Random Forest), a machine learning framework for dengue subtyping. We demonstrate that Craft is capable of faster classification speeds while matching or surpassing the accuracy of existing tools. Craft achieves 99.5% accuracy on a hold-out test set and processes over 140 000 sequences per minute. Notably, Craft maintains remarkably high accuracy even when classifying sequence segments as short as 700 nucleotides. Contactdanielvanzyl@sun.ac.za Supplementary informationA supplemental table acknowledging the authors of the GISAID dengue sequences is available at Bioinformatics online.