Modeling the toxicity of aromatic compounds to tetrahymena pyriformis: the response surface methodology with nonlinear methods.

Response surface models based on multiple linear regression had previously been developed for the toxicity of aromatic chemicals to Tetrahymena pyriformis. However, a nonlinear relationship between toxicity and one of the molecular descriptors in the response surface model was observed. In this study, response surface models were established using six nonlinear modeling methods to handle the nonlinearity exhibited in the aromatic chemicals data set. All models were validated using the method of cross-validation, and prediction accuracy was tested on an external data set. Results showed that response surface models based on locally weighted regression scatter plot smoothing (LOESS), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), neural networks (NN), and projection pursuit regression (PPR) provided satisfactory power of model fitting and prediction and had similar applicabilities. The response surface models based on nonlinear methods were difficult to interpret and conservative in discriminating toxicity mechanisms.