Accurate prediction of enthalpies of formation for a large set of organic compounds

This article describes a multiparameter calibration model, which improves the accuracy of density functional theory (DFT) for the prediction of standard enthalpies of formation for a large set of organic compounds. The model applies atom based, bond based, electronic, and radical environmental correction terms to calibrate the calculated enthalpies of formation at B3LYP/6‐31G(d,p) level by a least‐square method. A diverse data set of 771 closed‐shell compounds and radicals is used to train the model. The leave‐one‐out cross validation squared correlation coefficient q² of 0.84 and squared correlation coefficient r² of 0.86 for the final model are obtained. The meanabsolute error in enthalpies of formation for the dataset is reduced from 4.9 kcal/mol before calibration to 2.1 kcal/mol after calibration. Five‐fold cross validation is also used to estimate the performance of the calibration model and similar results are obtained. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010