lazar: a modular predictive toxicology framework.

lazar (lazy structure-activity relationships) is a modular framework for predictive toxicology. Similar to the read across procedure in toxicological risk assessment, lazar creates local QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship) models for each compound to be predicted. Model developers can choose between a large variety of algorithms for descriptor calculation and selection, chemical similarity indices, and model building. This paper presents a high level description of the lazar framework and discusses the performance of example classification and regression models.