Improving Chemical Reaction Prediction with Unlabeled Data

Predicting products of organic chemical reactions is useful in chemical sciences, especially when one or more reactants are new organics. However, the performance of traditional learning models heavily relies on high-quality labeled data. In this work, to utilize unlabeled data for better prediction performance, we propose a method that combines semi-supervised learning with graph convolutional neural networks for chemical reaction prediction. First, we propose a Mean Teacher Weisfeiler–Lehman Network to find the reaction centers. Then, we construct the candidate product set. Finally, we use an Improved Weisfeiler–Lehman Difference Network to rank candidate products. Experimental results demonstrate that, with 400k labeled data, our framework can improve the top-5 accuracy by 0.7% using 35k unlabeled data. When the proportion of unlabeled data increases, the performance gain can be larger. For example, with 80k labeled data and 35k unlabeled data, the performance gain with our framework can be 1.8%.