Molecular Design Based on Integer Programming and Quadratic Descriptors in a Two-layered Model

A novel framework has recently been proposed for designing the molecular structure of chemical compounds with a desired chemical property, where design of novel drugs is an important topic in bioinformatics and chemo-informatics. The framework infers a desired chemical graph by solving a mixed integer linear program (MILP) that simulates the computation process of a feature function defined by a two-layered model on chemical graphs and a prediction function constructed by a machine learning method. A set of graph theoretical descriptors in the feature function plays a key role to derive a compact formulation of such an MILP. To improve the learning performance of prediction functions in the framework maintaining the compactness of the MILP, this paper utilizes the product of two of those descriptors as a new descriptor and then designs a method of reducing the number of descriptors. The results of our computational experiments suggest that the proposed method improved the learning performance for many chemical properties and can infer a chemical structure with up to 50 non-hydrogen atoms.