Quantitative prediction of liquid chromatography retention of N-benzylideneanilines based on quantum chemical parameters and radial basis function neural network.

Based on quantum chemical parameters and a simple numerical coding, the liquid chromatography retention of bifunctionally substituted N-benzylideneaniles (NBA) has been predicted using a radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) model. The quantum chemical parameters involved in the model are dipole moment (m), energies of the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (E(homo,) E(lumo)), net charge of the most negative atom (Q(min)), sum of absolute values of the charges of all atoms in two given functional groups (Delta), total energy of the molecule (E(T)), weight of the molecule (W), and numerical coding (N). N was used to indicate the different positions of two substituents. The predictive values are consistent with the experimental results. The mean relative error of the testing set is 1.6%, and the maximum relative error is less than 5.0%. In this work the success of the whole modeling process only depends on the optimization of the spread parameter in network.