A Hierarchy of Interactions between Pathogenic Virus and Vertebrate Host

This review is of basic models of the interactions between a pathogenic virus and vertebrate animal host. The interactions at the population level are described by a predatory-prey model, a common approach in the ecological sciences, and depend on births and deaths within each population. This ecological perspective is complemented by models at the genetical level, which includes the dynamics of gene frequencies and the mechanisms of evolution. These perspectives are symmetrical in their relatedness and reflect the idealized forms of processes in natural systems. In the latter sections, the general use of deep learning methods is discussed within the above context, and proposed for effective modeling of the response of a pathogenic virus in a pathogen–host system, which can lead to predictions about mutation and recombination in the virus population.