Predicting Di-2-Ethylhexyl Phthalate Toxicity: Hybrid Integrated Harris Hawks Optimization with Support Vector Machines

Abstract

Phthalic acid esters (PAEs) are organic pollutants and synthetic compounds and have adverse effects on human health. In this study, we investigated whether Di-2-Ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), one of many PAEs, has adverse effects on rats. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were treated daily by oral gavage with vehicle (corn oil) or DEHP at a dose of 3000 mg/kg/day for 15 days. The results showed that DEHP caused hepatotoxicity in rats. When compared with the control group, relative liver weights, and serum alanine, aminotransferase levels significantly increased after DEHP exposure. Hepatocyte swelling and degeneration were also found in DEHP-exposed rats. This study proposes an effective intelligence framework for the prediction of DEHP poisoning. The framework is designed by integrating an enhanced Harris hawks optimization (HHO) with a support vector machine (SVM), which is called SGLHHO-SVM. The core characteristic of the developed methodology is the SGLHHO algorithm that integrates the levy mechanism and two core operators abstracted from the salp swarm algorithm and grey wolf optimizer to enhance and restore the search capabilities of the HHO. The presented SGLHHO approach is used to tackle the key parameter pair optimization of the SVM, and it is also utilized to grab the optimal feature subset. Regarding the optimal feature subset and the pair parameter simultaneously, SGLHHO-SVM can autonomously predict the DEHP poisoning. The developed SGLHHO was conducted on 23 benchmark problems and compared with other state-of-the-art and competitive methods. The results demonstrate that the designed SGLHHO performs superior to other competitors on most benchmark problems. Furthermore, the proposed SGLHHO-SVM is also compared with other machine learning algorithms on a real-life DEHP sampled data. Statistical results verify the proposal can show better predictive property and higher stability on all for metrics. Therefore, the SGLHHO-SVM may be served as a potential computer-aided tool for the prediction of DEHP poisoning.