Imputing the mammalian virome with linear filtering and singular value decomposition

At most 1-2% of the global virome has been sampled to date. Here, we develop a novel method that combines Linear Filtering (LF) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to infer host-virus associations. Using this method, we recovered highly plausible undiscovered interactions with a strong signal of viral coevolutionary history, and revealed a global hotspot of unusually unique but unsampled (or unrealized) host-virus interactions in the Amazon rainforest. We finally show that graph embedding of the imputed network can be used to improve predictions of human infection from viral genome features, showing that the global structure of the mammal-virus network provides additional insights into human disease emergence.