Interpretable detection of novel human viruses from genome sequencing data

Jakub M Bartoszewicz; Anja Seidel; Bernhard Y Renard

Building sequence logos involves calculating information content (IC) of each nucleotide at each position in a prospective DNA motif. This can be then interpreted as measure of evolutionary sequence conservation. However, high IC does not necessarily imply that a given nucleotide is relevant in terms of its contribution to the classifier's output. Some sub-motifs may be present in the sequences used to build the logo, even if they do not contribute to the final prediction (or even a given filter's activation).