Poster presented at the Deep Learning Indaba 2025 in Kigali, Rwanda. It summarises an alignment-free machine learning and deep learning pipeline that classifies Dengue virus (DENV) genomes into lineages and flags potential new variants. Genomes are encoded with k-mer counts, Frequency Chaos Game Representation (FCGR), and one-hot encoding, then classified with Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, hierarchical classifiers, a 1D-CNN with self-attention, and a 2D-CNN, all reaching over 97% accuracy and/or F1-score. Class imbalance is handled with SMOTE. A Variational Autoencoder generates synthetic genomes, and a soft-voting ensemble flags candidate new variants rapidly, in agreement with the Genome Detective typing tool.