SARS-CoV-2 variants classification and characterization

As of late 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spread globally, giving several variants over time. These variants, unfortunately, differ from the original sequence identified in Wuhan, thus risking compromising the efficacy of the vaccines developed. Some software has been released to recognize currently known and newly spread variants. However, some of these tools are not entirely automatic. Some others, instead, do not return a detailed characterization of all the mutations in the samples. Indeed, such characterization can be helpful for biologists to understand the variability between samples.
This paper presents a Machine Learning (ML) approach to identifying existing and new variants completely automatically. In addition, a detailed table showing all the alterations and mutations found in the samples is provided in output to the user. SARS-CoV-2 sequences are obtained from the GISAID database, and a list of features is custom designed (e.g., number of mutations in each gene of the virus) to train the algorithm. The recognition of existing variants is performed through a Random Forest classifier while identifying newly spread variants is accomplished by the DBSCAN algorithm. Both Random Forest and DBSCAN techniques demonstrated high precision on a new variant that arose during the drafting of this paper (used only in the testing phase of the algorithm). Therefore, researchers will significantly benefit from the proposed algorithm and the detailed output with the main alterations of the samples.
The tool is freely available here, whereas the paper can be downloaded here.