The pKa value of drugs is an important parameter in drug design and pharmacology. In this paper, an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was proposed based on the population entropy diversity. In the improved algorithm, when the population entropy was higher than the set maximum threshold, the convergence strategy was adopted; when the population entropy was lower than the set minimum threshold the divergence strategy was adopted; when the population entropy was between the maximum and minimum threshold, the self-adaptive adjustment strategy was maintained. The improved PSO algorithm was applied in the training of radial basis function artificial neural network (RBF ANN) model and the selection of molecular descriptors. A quantitative structure-activity relationship model based on RBF ANN trained by the improved PSO algorithm was proposed to predict the pKa values of 74 kinds of neutral and basic drugs and then validated by another database containing 20 molecules. The validation results showed that the model had a good prediction performance. The absolute average relative error, root mean square error, and squared correlation coefficient were 0.3105, 0.0411, and 0.9685, respectively. The model can be used as a reference for exploring other quantitative structure-activity relationships.

Excellent prediction modeling of CO₂solubility in polymers using hybrid computation algorithm.

A quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) model is proposed to explore the relationship between the pKa of various compounds and their structures. Through QSPR studies, the relationship between the structure and properties can be obtained. In this study, a novel chaos-enhanced accelerated particle swarm algorithm (CAPSO) is adopted to screen molecular descriptors and optimize the weights of back propagation artificial neural network (BP ANN). Then, the QSPR model based on CAPSO and BP ANN is proposed and named the CAPSO BP ANN model. The prediction experiment showed that the CAPSO algorithm was a reliable method for screening molecular descriptors. The five molecular descriptors obtained by the CAPSO algorithm could well characterize the molecular structure of each compound in pKa prediction. The experimental results also showed that the CAPSO BP ANN model exhibited good performance in predicting the pKa values of various compounds. The absolute mean relative error, root mean square error, and square correlation coefficient are respectively 0.5364, 0.0632, and 0.9438, indicating the high prediction accuracy. The proposed hybrid intelligent model can be applied in engineering design and the prediction of physical and chemical properties.

Aqueous solubility is one of the most important physicochemical properties in drug discovery. At present, the prediction of aqueous solubility of compounds is still a challenging problem. Machine learning has shown great potential in solubility prediction. Most machine learning models largely rely on the setting of hyperparameters, and their performance can be improved by setting the hyperparameters in a better way. In this paper, we used MACCS fingerprints to represent the structural features and optimized the hyperparameters of the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) with the cuckoo search algorithm (CS). Based on the above representation and optimization, the CS-LightGBM model was established to predict the aqueous solubility of 2446 organic compounds and the obtained prediction results were compared with those obtained with the other six different machine learning models (RF, GBDT, XGBoost, LightGBM, SVR, and BO-LightGBM). The comparison results showed that the CS-LightGBM model had a better prediction performance than the other six different models. RMSE, MAE, and R ² of the CS-LightGBM model were, respectively, 0.7785, 0.5117, and 0.8575. In addition, this model has good scalability and can be used to solve solubility prediction problems in other fields such as solvent selection and drug screening.

Solubility prediction model based on a hybrid artificial neural network.