  The rapid mutation of the influenza virus threatens public health.
Reassortment among viruses with different hosts can lead to a fatal pandemic.
However, it is difficult to detect the original host of the virus during or
after an outbreak as influenza viruses can circulate between different species.
Therefore, early and rapid detection of the viral host would help reduce the
further spread of the virus. We use various machine learning models with
features derived from the position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM) and features
learned from word embedding and word encoding to infer the origin host of
viruses. The results show that the performance of the PSSM-based model reaches
the MCC around 95%, and the F1 around 96%. The MCC obtained using the model
with word embedding is around 96%, and the F1 is around 97%.
