Computational Method for Classification of Avian Influenza A Virus Using DNA Sequence Information and Physicochemical Properties.

Accurate and fast characterization of the subtype sequences of Avian influenza A virus (AIAV) hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) depends on expanding diagnostic services and is embedded in molecular epidemiological studies. A new approach for classifying the AIAV sequences of the HA and NA genes into subtypes using DNA sequence data and physicochemical properties is proposed. This method simply requires unaligned, full-length, or partial sequences of HA or NA DNA as input. It allows for quick and highly accurate assignments of HA sequences to subtypes H1-H16 and NA sequences to subtypes N1-N9. For feature extraction, k-gram, discrete wavelet transformation, and multivariate mutual information were used, and different classifiers were trained for prediction. Four different classifiers, Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K nearest neighbor (KNN), and Decision Tree, were compared using our feature selection method. This comparison is based on the 30% dataset separated from the original dataset for testing purposes. Among the four classifiers, Decision Tree was the best, and Precision, Recall, F1 score, and Accuracy were 0.9514, 0.9535, 0.9524, and 0.9571, respectively. Decision Tree had considerable improvements over the other three classifiers using our method. Results show that the proposed feature selection method, when trained with a Decision Tree classifier, gives the best results for accurate prediction of the AIAV subtype.