MOTIVATION: An important goal of concentration-response studies in toxicology is to determine an 'alert' concentration where a critical level of the response variable is exceeded. In a classical observation-based approach, only measured concentrations are considered as potential alert concentrations. Alternatively, a parametric curve is fitted to the data that describes the relationship between concentration and response. For a prespecified effect level, both an absolute estimate of the alert concentration and an estimate of the lowest concentration where the effect level is exceeded significantly are of interest. RESULTS: In a simulation study for gene expression data, we compared the observation-based and the model-based approach for both absolute and significant exceedance of the prespecified effect level. Results show that, compared to the observation-based approach, the model-based approach overestimates the true alert concentration less often and more frequently leads to a valid estimate, especially for genes with large variance. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The code used for the simulation studies is available via the GitHub repository: https://github.com/FKappenberg/Paper-IdentificationAlertConcentrations. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Campus data analysis is becoming increasingly important in mining students’ behavior. The consumption data of college students is an important part of the campus data, which can reflect the students’ behavior to a great degree. A few methods have been used to analyze students’ consumption data, such as classification, association rules, clustering, decision trees, time series, etc. However, they do not use the method of sequential patterns mining, which results in some important information missing. Moreover, they only consider the occurring (positive) events but do not consider the nonoccurring (negative) events, which may lead to some important information missing. So this paper uses a positive and negative sequential patterns mining algorithm, called NegI-NSP, to analyze the consumption data of students. Moreover, we associate students’ consumption data with their academic grades by adding the students’ academic grades into sequences to analyze the relationship between the students’ academic grades and their consumptions. The experimental results show that the students’ academic performance has significant correlation with the habits of having breakfast regularly.