A novel method for inference of acyclic chemical compounds with bounded branch-height based on artificial neural networks and integer programming

Analysis of chemical graphs is a major research topic in computational molecular biology due to its potential applications to drug design. One approach is inverse quantitative structure activity/property relationship (inverse QSAR/QSPR) analysis, which is to infer chemical structures from given chemical activities/properties. Recently, a framework has been proposed for inverse QSAR/QSPR using artificial neural networks (ANN) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP). This method consists of a prediction phase and an inverse prediction phase. In the first phase, a feature vector $f(G)$ of a chemical graph $G$ is introduced and a prediction function $\psi$ on a chemical property $\pi$ is constructed with an ANN. In the second phase, given a target value $y^*$ of property $\pi$, a feature vector $x^*$ is inferred by solving an MILP formulated from the trained ANN so that $\psi(x^*)$ is close to $y^*$ and then a set of chemical structures $G^*$ such that $f(G^*)= x^*$ is enumerated by a graph search algorithm. The framework has been applied to the case of chemical compounds with cycle index up to 2. The computational results conducted on instances with $n$ non-hydrogen atoms show that a feature vector $x^*$ can be inferred for up to around $n=40$ whereas graphs $G^*$ can be enumerated for up to $n=15$. When applied to the case of chemical acyclic graphs, the maximum computable diameter of $G^*$ was around up to around 8. We introduce a new characterization of graph structure, "branch-height," based on which an MILP formulation and a graph search algorithm are designed for chemical acyclic graphs. The results of computational experiments using properties such as octanol/water partition coefficient, boiling point and heat of combustion suggest that the proposed method can infer chemical acyclic graphs $G^*$ with $n=50$ and diameter 30.