Deep learning methods applied to chemistry can be used to accelerate the discovery of new molecules. This work introduces GraphINVENT, a platform developed for graph-based molecular design using graph neural networks (GNNs). GraphINVENT uses a tiered deep neural network architecture to probabilistically generate new molecules a single bond at a time. All models implemented in GraphINVENT can quickly learn to build molecules resembling the training set molecules without any explicit programming of chemical rules. The models have been benchmarked using the MOSES distribution-based metrics, showing how GraphINVENT models compare well with state-of-the-art generative models. This work compares six different GNN-based generative models in GraphINVENT, and shows that ultimately the gated-graph neural network performs best against the metrics considered here.

Deep learning methods applied to chemistry can be used to accelerate the discovery of new molecules. This work introduces GraphINVENT, a platform developed for graph-based molecular design using graph neural networks (GNNs). GraphINVENT uses a tiered deep neural network architecture to probabilistically generate new molecules a single bond at a time. All models implemented in GraphINVENT can quickly learn to build molecules resembling the training set molecules without any explicit programming of chemical rules. The models have been benchmarked using the MOSES distribution-based metrics, showing how GraphINVENT models compare well with state-of-the-art generative models. This work is one of the first thorough graph-based molecular design studies, and illustrates how GNN-based models are promising tools for molecular discovery.<br>

Deep learning methods applied to chemistry can be used to accelerate the discovery of new molecules. This work introduces GraphINVENT, a platform developed for graph-based molecular design using graph neural networks (GNNs). GraphINVENT uses a tiered deep neural network architecture to probabilistically generate new molecules a single bond at a time. All models implemented in GraphINVENT can quickly learn to build molecules resembling the training set molecules without any explicit programming of chemical rules. The models have been benchmarked using the MOSES distribution-based metrics, showing how GraphINVENT models compare well with state-of-the-art generative models. This work is one of the first thorough graph-based molecular design studies, and illustrates how GNN-based models are promising tools for molecular discovery.<br>

Here are presented technical notes and tips on developing graph generative models for molecular design. Although this work stems from the development of GraphINVENT, a Python platform for iterative molecular generation using graph neural networks, this work is relevant to researchers studying other architectures for graph-based molecular design. In this work, technical details that could be of interest to researchers developing their own molecular generative models are discussed, including an overview of previous work in graphbased molecular design and strategies for designing new models. Advice on development and debugging tools which are helpful during code development is also provided. Finally, methods that were tested but which ultimately did not lead to promising results in the development of GraphINVENT are described here in the hope that this will help other researchers avoid pitfalls in development and instead focus their efforts on more promising strategies for graph-based molecular generation.