Backpropagation Neural Network-Based Prediction of Kovats Retention Index for Essential Oil Compounds

Abstract

The identification of chemical compounds in essential oils is crucial in industries such as pharmaceuticals, perfumery, and food. Kovats Retention Index (RI) values are essential for compound identification using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Traditional RI determination methods are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and susceptible to experimental variability. Recent advancements in data science suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance RI prediction accuracy and efficiency. However, the full potential of AI, particularly artificial neural networks (ANN), in predicting RI values remains underexplored. This study develops a backpropagation neural network (BPNN) model to predict the Kovats RI values of essential oil compounds using five molecular descriptors: ATSc1, VCH-7, SP-1, Kier1, and MLogP. We trained the BPNN on a dataset of 340 essential oil compounds and optimized it through hyperparameter tuning. We show that the optimized BPNN model, with an epoch count of 100, a learning rate of 0.1, a hidden layer size of 10 neurons, and the ReLU activation function, achieves an R² value of 0.934 and a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 76.98. These results indicate a high correlation between predicted and actual RI values and a low average prediction error. Our findings demonstrate that BPNNs can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of compound identification, reducing reliance on traditional experimental methods.