A machine learning approach for predicting the reactivity power of hypervalent iodine compounds

The knowledge of chemical reactivity of substrates is a prerequisite to accurately design a chemical reaction; however, it has been a challenging task due to the slow trial-and-error experimental approaches and the high computational cost associated with in silico investigations. Artificial intelligence techniques could serve as an alternative to efficiently determine the relative reactivity of chemical entities. In the context of this research, we propose an artificial neural network model to predict the bond dissociation energies of hypervalent iodine reagents. An open-source cheminformatics package, namely, Mordred, was employed for calculating various 1D, 2D and topological descriptors. The approach utilizes a dataset of more than 1000 hypervalent iodine reagents, and the bond dissociation energies can be predicted with a remarkable accuracy, as suggested by an R2 score of 0.97 and a mean absolute error of 1.96 kcal/mol. Owing to the low cost and high efficiency, this machine learning approach can provide an alternative to the theoretical/experimental approaches to rationally design a chemical reaction and without having to go through the hassle of high-throughput experimentation to reach the desired reaction outcome. In an effort to make the model interpretable, a feature importance algorithm was applied, which identified descriptors contributing most to the development of the model. Features describing electronegativity and polarizability are some of the important contributors to the model’s training.