Chemically Informed Deep Learning for Interpretable Radical Reaction Prediction

Organic radical reactions are crucial in many areas of chemistry, including synthetic, biological, and atmospheric chemistry. We develop a predictive framework based on the interaction of molecular orbitals that operates on mechanistic-level radical reactions. Given our chemistry-aware model, all predictions are provided with different levels of interpretability. Our models are trained and evaluated using the RMechDB database of radical reaction steps. Our model predicts the correct orbital interaction and products for 96% of the test reactions in RMechDB. By chaining these predictions, we perform a pathway search capable of identifying all intermediates and byproducts of a radical reaction. We test the pathway search on two classes of problems in atmospheric and polymerization chemistry. RMechRP is publicly available online at https://deeprxn.ics.uci.edu/rmechrp/.