Development of a quantitative structure--property relationship model for estimating normal boiling points of small multifunctional organic molecules

Computer-assisted quantitative structure-property relationship techniques are applied in the development of a robust and accurate model of normal boiling points (boiling at 760 mmHg) for a very diverse set of 268 small organic molecules. Most of the molecules included in this study contain two or more functional groups. The final model yields a tight fit to the training set data (R2 = 0.963), with a fit error of 6.5%. More importantly, the model is also shown to perform well in external prediction. The mean prediction error for boiling points for a 78-member external test set was 12.3 degrees C, or 8.3%. A detailed analysis of the small number of compounds that were either outliers or not well predicted illustrates areas for potential improvement of the methodology used.