Structure
elucidation of chemical compounds is a complex and challenging
activity that requires expertise and well-suited tools. To assign
the molecular structure of a given compound, 13C NMR is
one of the most widely used techniques because of its broad range
of structural information. Taking into account that molecules found
in nature can be grouped into natural product (NP) classes because
of structural similarities, we explore the possibility of NP class
prediction via 13C NMR data. Employing freely available 13C NMR data of NPs, we trained four classifiers for the prediction
of eight common NP classes. The best performance was obtained with
the XGBoost classifier reaching f1-scores of above 0.82. We also performed
experiments with different percentages of positive samples, including
the glycoside presence. Furthermore, we tested cases outside the data
set, yielding performances above 80% for most classes. For the chromans
case, we restricted the test examples to the coumarin subclass, and
the prediction accuracy increased to 100%.