Feature Selection for the Interpretation of Antioxidant Mechanisms in Plant Phenolics

Antioxidants, represented by plant phenolics, protect living tissues by scavenging reactive oxygen species through diverse reaction mechanisms. Research on antioxidants is often individualized, for example, focusing on the evaluation of their activity against a single reactive oxygen species or examining the antioxidant properties of compounds with similar structures. In this study, multivariate analysis was used to comprehensively examine antioxidant properties. Eighteen features were selected to explain the results of the antioxidant capacity tests. These selected features were then evaluated by supervised learning, using the results of the antioxidant capacity assays. Dimension-reduction techniques were also used to represent the compound space with antioxidants as a two-dimensional distribution. A small amount of data obtained from several assays provided us with comprehensive information on the relationships between the structures and activities of antioxidants.