The sbv IMPROVER Systems Toxicology Computational Challenge: Identification of Human and Species-Independent Blood Response Markers as Predictors of Smoking Exposure and Cessation Status.

•Crowdsourcing enables independent and unbiased evaluations of computational methods.•Markers predictive of smoking status were identified in blood gene expression data.•Discriminating former and never smokers was challenging using blood transcriptomics.•The development of human and cross-species inductive predictive models was a success.•The crowd wisdom enabled to find consensus blood smoking exposure gene signatures.