VPF-Class 2.0: a taxonomy-centered framework for automatic viral classification

Abstract Rapid expansion of viral sequence data demands classifiers that scale, track ICTV updates, and provide interpretable evidence. We present VPF-Class 2.0, an updated successor to VPF-Class, centred on the taxonomic classification, that retains marker-driven protein domain detection but replaces rule-based voting with a lightweight supervised model on per-genome marker-composition features. In controlled benchmarks, VPF-Class 2.0 achieves near-perfect family-level performance and strong genus-level accuracy while increasing confident annotation coverage. Under a practical confidence threshold (0.3), performance improves and matches or exceeds representative tools within shared taxonomic scopes. We further introduce an interpretability study that relates errors to the genus specificity of activated markers. Finally, we demonstrate applicability on large real-world viromes with consistent labels and substantial agreement with graph-based classifications. The implementation of VPF-Class 2.0 can be downloaded from https://github.com/luisvidalj/VPFClass2.git .