Transfer Learning from Simulation to Experimental Data: NMR Chemical Shift Predictions

An accurate prediction of chemical shifts (δ) to elucidate molecular structures has been a challenging problem. Recently, noble machine learning architectures achieve accurate prediction performance, but the difficulty of building a huge chemical database limits the applicability of machine learning approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that the prior knowledge gained from the simulation database is successfully transferred into the problem of predicting an experimentally measured δ. Although both simulation and experimental databases are vastly different in chemical perspectives, reliable accuracy for δ is achieved by additional training with randomly sampled small numbers of experimental data. Furthermore, the prior knowledge allows us to successfully train the model on the more focused chemical space that the experimental database sparsely covers. The proposed approach, the knowledge transfer from the simulation database, can be utilized to enhance the usability of the local experimental database.