分离化学与结构信息,提升药物溶解度预测的可解释性。
An Additive MLP-GNN Framework for Characterizing Chemical and Structural Contributions to Aqueous Solubility

- 用MLP和GNN分别处理化学描述符与分子结构,训练中保持分离。
- 在AqSolDB和BigSolDB2上预测准确率提升,结果更稳定。
- 支持分子级、原子级分析,揭示化学与结构对溶解度的影响。
水溶性是新药研发早期的关键性质,但现有模型常将理化描述符与分子图信息融合为单一表征,难以区分预测依据来自整体化学特性、分子结构或两者结合。本文提出一种加法型深度学习框架,全程分离两种信息:理化描述符由多层感知机(化学分支)编码,分子图拓扑由图神经网络(结构分支)编码,仅在预测阶段通过加法模型(可选乘法交互)融合。该设计使化学与结构成分在训练后可独立解析。在更大规模的AqSolDB上预训练,并在更小的BigSolDB2上微调,显著提升精度并降低运行波动,表明特征具有良好的泛化能力。通过最佳线性投影、不同溶解度类别的分子嵌入摘要及基于功能基团聚合的原子级GNNExplainer掩码,我们发现化学分支与经典理化参数一致,结构分支则捕捉了与溶解度相关的图拓扑和官能团模式。在两个数据集上均达到有竞争力的预测性能,同时清晰揭示化学与结构信息的独立作用。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Aqueous solubility is a key property in early-stage drug discovery, but most predictive models merge physicochemical descriptors and molecular graph information into a single representation, obscuring whether a prediction is driven by global chemistry, molecular structure, or both. We present an additive deep-learning framework that keeps these two sources of information separate throughout training: physicochemical descriptors are encoded by a multilayer perceptron (the chemical branch) and molecular graph topology by a graph neural network (the structural branch), with the two outputs combined only at the prediction stage through an additive model with an optional multiplicative interaction. This design provides a direct decomposition of chemical and structural components that can be examined separately after training. Furthermore, pretraining on the larger AqSolDB dataset and fine-tuning on the smaller BigSolDB2 dataset substantially improve accuracy and reduce run-to-run variations, indicating generalizability of the learned features from the data-rich settings. We further interpret the fitted model using best linear projections of the branch outputs, molecule-level embedding summaries across solubility classes, and atom-level GNNExplainer masks aggregated over functional groups. These analyses show that the chemical branch aligns with familiar physicochemical descriptors, while the structural branch captures graph-topological and functional-group patterns associated with solubility. Across both datasets, the framework attains competitive predictive performance while making the distinct roles of chemical and structural information more transparent.
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