Representing Polymers as Periodic Graphs with Learned Descriptors for Accurate Polymer Property Predictions

Accurately predicting new polymers' properties with machine learning models apriori to synthesis has potential to significantly accelerate new polymers' discovery and development. However, accurately and efficiently capturing polymers' complex, periodic structures in machine learning models remains a grand challenge for the polymer cheminformatics community. Specifically, there has yet to be an ideal solution for the problems of how to capture the periodicity of polymers, as well as how to optimally develop polymer descriptors without requiring human-based feature design. In this work, we tackle these problems by utilizing a periodic polymer graph representation that accounts for polymers' periodicity and coupling it with a message-passing neural network that leverages the power of graph deep learning to automatically learn chemically relevant polymer descriptors. Remarkably, this approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on 8 out of 10 distinct polymer property prediction tasks. These results highlight the advancement in predictive capability that is possible through learning descriptors that are specifically optimized for capturing the unique chemical structure of polymers.