The recent success of graph neural networks has significantly boosted molecular property prediction, advancing activities such as drug discovery. The existing deep neural network methods usually require large training dataset for each property, impairing their performances in cases (especially for new molecular properties) with a limited amount of experimental data, which are common in real situations. To this end, we propose Meta-MGNN, a novel model for few-shot molecular property prediction. Meta-MGNN applies molecular graph neural network to learn molecular representation and builds a meta-learning framework for model optimization. To exploit unlabeled molecular information and address task heterogeneity of different molecular properties, Meta-MGNN further incorporates molecular structure, attribute based self-supervised modules and self-attentive task weights into the former framework, strengthening the whole learning model. Extensive experiments on two public multi-property datasets demonstrate that Meta-MGNN outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art methods.
The answers to many unsolved problems lie in the intractable chemical space of molecules and materials. Machine learning techniques are rapidly growing in popularity as a way to compress and explore chemical space efficiently. One of the most important aspects of machine learning techniques is representation through the feature vector, which should contain the most important descriptors necessary to make accurate predictions, not least of which is the atomic species in the molecule or material. In this work we introduce a compressed representation of physical properties for atomic species we call the elemental modes. The elemental modes provide an excellent representation by capturing many of the nuances of the periodic table and the similarity of atomic species. We apply the elemental modes to several different tasks for machine learning algorithms and show that they enable us to make improvements to these tasks even beyond simply achieving higher accuracy predictions.
Neural network (NN) model chemistries (MCs) promise to facilitate the accurate exploration of chemical space and simulation of large reactive systems. One important path to improving these models is to add layers of physical detail, especially long-range forces. At short range, however, these models are data driven and data limited. Little is systematically known about how data should be sampled, and `test data' chosen randomly from some sampling techniques can provide poor information about generality. If the sampling method is narrow `test error' can appear encouragingly tiny while the model fails catastrophically elsewhere. In this manuscript we competitively evaluate two common sampling methods: molecular dynamics (MD), normal-mode sampling (NMS) and one uncommon alternative, Metadynamics (MetaMD), for preparing training geometries. We show that MD is an inefficient sampling method in the sense that additional samples do not improve generality. We also show MetaMD is easily implemented in any NNMC software package with cost that scales linearly with the number of atoms in a sample molecule. MetaMD is a black-box way to ensure samples always reach out to new regions of chemical space, while remaining relevant to chemistry near $k_bT$. It is one cheap tool to address the issue of generalization.