rafah

One fundamental question when trying to describe viruses of Bacteria and Archaea is: Which host do they infect? To tackle this issue we developed a machine-learning approach named Random Forest Assignment of Hosts (RaFAH), which outperformed other methods for virus-host prediction. Our rationale was that the machine could learn the associations between genes and hosts much more efficiently than a human, while also using the information contained in the hypothetical proteins. Random forest models were built using the Ranger⁠ package in R⁠.