MOFSocialNet: Exploiting Metal-Organic Framework Relationships via Social Network Analysis

The number of metal-organic frameworks (MOF) as well as the number of applications of this material are growing rapidly. With the number of characterized compounds exceeding 100,000, manual sorting becomes impossible. At the same time, the increasing computer power and established use of automated machine learning approaches makes data science tools available, that provide an overview of the MOF chemical space and support the selection of suitable MOFs for a desired application. Among the different data science tools, graph theory approaches, where data generated from numerous real-world applications is represented as a graph (network) of interconnected objects, has been widely used in a variety of scientific fields such as social sciences, health informatics, biological sciences, agricultural sciences and economics. We describe the application of a particular graph theory approach known as social network analysis to MOF materials and highlight the importance of community (group) detection and graph node centrality. In this first application of the social network analysis approach to MOF chemical space, we created MOFSocialNet. This social network is based on the geometrical descriptors of MOFs available in the CoRE-MOFs database. MOFSocialNet can discover communities with similar MOFs structures and identify the most representative MOFs within a given community. In addition, analysis of MOFSocialNet using social network analysis methods can predict MOF properties more accurately than conventional ML tools. The latter advantage is demonstrated for the prediction of gas storage properties, the most important property of these porous reticular networks.