Prediction of Solvent Effects on Rate Constant of [2+2] Cycloaddition Reaction of Diethyl Azodicarboxylate with Ethyl Vinyl Ether Using Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs), for a first time, were successfully developed for the modeling and prediction of solvent effects on rate constant of [2+2] cycloaddition reaction of diethyl azodicarboxylate with ethyl vinyl ether in various solvents with diverse chemical structures using quantitative structure-activity relationship. The most positive charge of hydrogen atom (q$^+$), dipole moment ($\mu$), the Hildebrand solubility parameter (${\delta}_H^2$) and total charges in molecule (q$_t$) are inputs and output of ANN is log k$_2$ . For evaluation of the predictive power of the generated ANN, the optimized network with 68 various solvents as training set was used to predict log k$_2$ of the reaction in 16 solvents in the prediction set. The results obtained using ANN was compared with the experimental values as well as with those obtained using multi-parameter linear regression (MLR) model and showed superiority of the ANN model over the regression model. Mean square error (MSE) of 0.0806 for the prediction set by MLR model should be compared with the value of 0.0275 for ANN model. These improvements are due to the fact that the reaction rate constant shows non-linear correlations with the descriptors.