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Machine Learning for Scent: Learning Generalizable Perceptual Representations of Small Molecules

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arxiv 1910.10685 v2 pith:CSF5TRVH submitted 2019-10-23 stat.ML cs.LGphysics.chem-ph

Machine Learning for Scent: Learning Generalizable Perceptual Representations of Small Molecules

classification stat.ML cs.LGphysics.chem-ph
keywords learninggraphmachinenetworksneuralodorrelationshipalready
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Predicting the relationship between a molecule's structure and its odor remains a difficult, decades-old task. This problem, termed quantitative structure-odor relationship (QSOR) modeling, is an important challenge in chemistry, impacting human nutrition, manufacture of synthetic fragrance, the environment, and sensory neuroscience. We propose the use of graph neural networks for QSOR, and show they significantly out-perform prior methods on a novel data set labeled by olfactory experts. Additional analysis shows that the learned embeddings from graph neural networks capture a meaningful odor space representation of the underlying relationship between structure and odor, as demonstrated by strong performance on two challenging transfer learning tasks. Machine learning has already had a large impact on the senses of sight and sound. Based on these early results with graph neural networks for molecular properties, we hope machine learning can eventually do for olfaction what it has already done for vision and hearing.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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