Abstract
Analysis of chemical graphs is becoming a major research topic in
computational molecular biology due to its potential applications to drug
design. One of the major approaches in such a study is inverse quantitative
structure activity/property relationships (inverse QSAR/QSPR) analysis, which
is to infer chemical structures from given chemical activities/properties.
Recently, a novel framework has been proposed for inverse QSAR/QSPR using both
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 $\psi_{\mathcal{N}}$ on a chemical property $\pi$ is
constructed with an ANN $\mathcal{N}$. In the second phase, given a target
value $y^*$ of the chemical property $\pi$, a feature vector $x^*$ is inferred
by solving an MILP formulated from the trained ANN $\mathcal{N}$ so that
$\psi_{\mathcal{N}}(x^*)$ is equal to $y^*$ and then a set of chemical
structures $G^*$ such that $f(G^*)= x^*$ is enumerated by a graph enumeration
algorithm. The framework has been applied to chemical compounds with a rather
abstract topological structure such as acyclic or monocyclic graphs and graphs
with a specified polymer topology with cycle index up to 2.
In this paper, we propose a new flexible modeling method to the framework so
that we can specify a topological substructure of graphs and a partial
assignment of chemical elements and bond-multiplicity to a target graph.