Evidence map›Paper›PMID 41849780›Full record

ArticleJournal of chemical information and modeling2026

Compressing Chemistry Reveals Functional Groups.

Ruben Sharma, Ross D King

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of chemical information and modeling, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
0citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Ruben SharmaDepartment of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0AS, U.K.ORCID 0009-0004-0923-6383
Ross D KingDepartment of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0AS, U.K.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

We introduce the first formal large-scale assessment of the utility of traditional chemical functional groups as used in chemical explanations. Our assessment employs a fundamental principle from computational learning theory: a good compression of data should reveal a good explanation. We introduce an unsupervised learning algorithm based on the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle that searches for substructures that compress around three million biologically relevant molecules. We demonstrate that the discovered substructures contain most human-curated functional groups as well as novel larger patterns with more specific functions. We also run our algorithm on 24 specific bioactivity prediction data sets to discover data set-specific functional groups. Fingerprints constructed from data set-specific functional groups are shown to significantly outperform other fingerprint representations, including the MACCS and Morgan fingerprint, when training ridge regression models on bioactivity regression tasks.

Indexed as

Unsupervised Machine LearningAlgorithms

Identifiers

PMID41849780
PMCPMC13080982

What Socratic holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.