Fingerprint-enhanced hierarchical molecular graph neural networks for property prediction

Accurate prediction of molecular properties is crucial for selecting compounds with ideal properties and reducing the costs and risks of trials. Traditional methods based on manually crafted features and graph-based methods have shown promising results in molecular property prediction. However, traditional methods rely on expert knowledge and often fail to capture the complex structures and interactions within molecules. Similarly, graph-based methods typically overlook the chemical structure and function hidden in molecular motifs and struggle to effectively integrate global and local molecular information. To address these limitations, we propose a novel fingerprint-enhanced hierarchical graph neural network (FH-GNN) for molecular property prediction that simultaneously learns information from hierarchical molecular graphs and fingerprints. The FH-GNN captures diverse hierarchical chemical information by applying directed message-passing neural networks (D-MPNN) on a hierarchical molecular graph that integrates atomic-level, motif-level, and graph-level information along with their relationships. Additionally, we used an adaptive attention mechanism to balance the importance of hierarchical graphs and fingerprint features, creating a comprehensive molecular embedding that integrated hierarchical molecular structures with domain knowledge. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets from MoleculeNet showed that FH-GNN outperformed the baseline models in both classification and regression tasks for molecular property prediction, validating its capability to comprehensively capture molecular information. By integrating molecular structure and chemical knowledge, FH-GNN provides a powerful tool for the accurate prediction of molecular properties and aids in the discovery of potential drug candidates.