Developing a Support Vector Machine Based QSPR Model to Predict Gas-to-Benzene Solvation Enthalpy of Organic Compounds

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel way to building quantitative structure-property relationship （QSPR） models for predicting the gas-to-benzene solvation enthalpy （△Hsolv） of 158 organic compounds based on molecular descriptors calculated from the structure alone. Different kinds of descriptors were calculated for each compounds using dragon package. The variable selection technique of enhanced replacement method （ERM） was employed to select optimal subset of descriptors. Our investigation reveals that the dependence of physico-chemical properties on solvation enthalpy is a nonlinear observable fact and that ERM method is unable to model the solvation enthalpy accurately. The standard error value of prediction set for support vector machine （SVM） is 1.681 kJ·mol^-1 while it is 4.624kJ·mol^-1 for ERM. The results established that the calculated △Hsolv values by SVM were in good agreement with the experimental ones, and the performances of the SVM models were superior to those obtained by ERM one. This indicates that SVM can be used as an alternative modeling tool for QSPR studies.