Beyond Atoms and Bonds: Contextual Explainability via Molecular Graphical Depictions

07 March 2022, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

The field of explainable AI applied to molecular property prediction models has often been reduced to deriving atomic contributions. This has impaired the interpretability of such models, as chemists rather think in terms of larger, chemically meaningful structures, which often do not simply reduce to the sum of their atomic constituents. We develop an explanatory framework yielding both local as well as more complex structural attributions. We derive such contextual explanations in pixel space, exploiting the property that a molecule is not merely encoded through a collection of atoms and bonds, as is the case for string- or graph-based approaches. We provide evidence that the proposed explanation method satisfies desirable properties, namely sparsity and invariance with respect to the molecule’s symmetries.

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.