Exhaustive Structure Generation for Inverse-QSPR/QSAR

Chemical structure generation based on quantitative structure property relationship (QSPR) or quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) models is one of the central themes in the field of computer-aided molecular design. The objective of structure generation is to find promising molecules, which according to statistical models, are considered to have desired properties. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the exhaustive generation of chemical structures based on inverse-QSPR/QSAR. In this method, QSPR/QSAR models are constructed by multiple linear regression method, and then the conditional distribution of explanatory variables given the desired properties is estimated by inverse analysis of the models using the framework of a linear Gaussian model. Finally, chemical structures are exhaustively generated by a sophisticated algorithm that is based on a canonical construction path method. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated using a dataset of the boiling points of acyclic hydrocarbons containing up to 12 carbon atoms. The QSPR model was constructed with 600 hydrocarbons and their boiling points. Using the proposed method, chemical structures which had boiling points of 100, 150, or 200 °C were exhaustively generated.