The simple linear neural network model was investigated as a method for automated interpretation of infrared spectra. The model was trained using a database of infrared spectra of organic compounds of known structure. The model was able to learn, without any prior input of spectrum-structure correlations, to recognize and identify 76 functional groupings with accuracies ranging from fair to excellent. The effect of network input parameters and of training set composition were studied, and several sources of spurious correlations were identified and corrected.

A neural network which utilized data from the infrared spectra, carbon-13 NMR spectra, and molecular formulas of organic compounds was developed. The network, which had one layer of hidden units, was trained by backpropagation; network parameters were determined by a simplex optimization procedure. A database of 1560 compounds was used for training and testing. The trained network was able to identify with high accuracy the presence of a broad range of substructural features present in the compounds. The number of features identified and the accuracy were significantly greater as compared with networks using data from a single form of spectroscopy. The results have significance for the SESAMI computer-enhanced structure elucidation system.

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A neural network model having a layer of hidden units is described which can identify functional groups in organic compounds, based on their infrared spectra. This network shows substantially better performance than the simple linear model reported earlier. The effect of the training set size and composition, the number of hidden units used, and the training time were studied.

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