Attention-Based Hybrid Deep Learning Models for Classifying COVID-19 Genome Sequences

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 genetic sequence research is crucial despite immunizations and pandemic control. COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 must be understood genomically for several reasons. New viral strains may resist vaccines. Categorizing genetic sequences helps researchers track changes and assess immunization efficacy. Classifying COVID-19 genome sequences with other viruses helps to understand its evolution and interactions with other illnesses. Methods: The proposed study introduces a deep learning-based COVID-19 genomic sequence categorization approach. Attention-based hybrid deep learning (DL) models categorize 1423 COVID-19 and 11,388 other viral genome sequences. An unknown dataset is also used to assess the models. The five models’ accuracy, f1-score, area under the curve (AUC), precision, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and recall are evaluated. Results: The results indicate that the Convolutional neural network (CNN) with Bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) with attention layer (CNN-BLSTM-Att) achieved an accuracy of 99.99%, which outperformed the other models. For external validation, the model shows an accuracy of 99.88%. It reveals that DL-based approaches with an attention layer can accurately classify COVID-19 genomic sequences with a high degree of accuracy. This method might assist in identifying and classifying COVID-19 virus strains in clinical situations. Immunizations have lowered COVID-19 danger, but categorizing its genetic sequences is crucial to global health activities to plan for recurrence or future viral threats.