RESUMEN
Background With the increasing exposure to hazardous chemicals in the workplace and frequency of occupational injuries and occupational safety accidents, the acquisition of occupational exposure limits of hazardous chemicals is imminent. Objective To obtain more unknown immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH) concentrations of hazardous chemicals in the workplace by exploring the application of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) prediction method to IDLH concentrations, and to provide a theoretical basis and technical support for the assessment and prevention of occupational injuries. Methods QSAR was used to correlate the IDLH values of 50 benzene and its derivatives with the molecular structures of target compounds. Firstly, affinity propagation algorithm was applied to cluster sample sets. Secondly, Dragon 2.1 software was used to calculate and pre-screen 537 molecular descriptors. Thirdly, the genetic algorithm was used to select six characteristic molecular descriptors as dependent variables and to construct a multiple linear regression model (MLR) and two nonlinear models using support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) respectively. Finally, model performance was evaluated by internal and external validation and Williams diagram was drawn to determine the scopes of selected models. Results The ANN model results showed that \begin{document}$ {R}_{\mathrm{t}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{n}}