Nanomeghyas

Nanomeghyas

Polycyclic Benzenoids HOMO-LUMO Gap Prediction Using Explainable Artificial Neural Network

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 Biotechnology Department, Faculty of new sciences and technologies
2 Biotechnology Department, Faculty of New Sciences and Technologies
3 Department of NanoTechnology,, Faculty of New Sciences and Technologies
Abstract
One of the major challenges in pharmaceutical chemistry is the accurate prediction of molecular electronic properties that influence drug behavior. The HOMO-LUMO energy gap, as a key descriptor of chemical reactivity and stability, plays a crucial role in both pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties. Although methods such as Density Functional Theory (DFT) are highly accurate, their high computational cost makes them unsuitable for large-scale screening. In this study, a machine learning-based model was developed to rapidly predict this energy gap. A dataset of 8,676 cata-condensed polyaromatic compounds containing 3 to 10 fused benzene rings was compiled. Nine chemically meaningful features were extracted and used to train multilayer perceptron (MLP) and recurrent neural network (RNN) models. The best-performing MLP model achieved an R² score of 0.9750 and a test loss of 0.0037. Saliency map analysis revealed that features such as ionization potential, electron affinity, and total energy had the most significant impact. These findings demonstrate that AI-based models can not only achieve high predictive accuracy but also provide valuable insights for drug design.
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  • Receive Date 04 May 2025
  • Revise Date 23 May 2025
  • Accept Date 04 August 2025