Molecular classification of Newcastle disease virus based on degree of virulence

Newcastle disease (ND) is one of the most serious infectious diseases of poultry, which have an important economic impact on poultry sector production. The causative agent of the disease is Newcastle disease virus (NDV). NDV strains can be classified into two types according to virulence, namely highly virulent (velogenic) and low virulent (lentogenic) based on their pathogenicity in chickens. In this paper, we address the problem of classifying the new isolated sequence of the newcastle disease virus according to the fusion protein. In order to classify the degree of virulence of the Newcastle virus, we propose a new approach based on the rotation forest algorithm. The performance of our approach is evaluated and compared with three benchmark algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithm is able to achieve perfect recognition on the benchmark dataset.