Accurate quantitative structure-property relationship model to predict the solubility of C60 in various solvents based on a novel approach using a least-squares support vector machine.

A least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) was used for the first time as a novel machine-learning technique for the prediction of the solubility of C60 in a large number of diverse solvents using calculated molecular descriptors from the molecular structure alone and on the basis of the software CODESSA as inputs. The heuristic method of CODESSA was used to select the correlated descriptors and build the linear model. Both the linear and the nonlinear models can give very satisfactory prediction results: the square of the correlation coefficient R(2) was 0.892 and 0.903, and the root-mean-square error was 0.126 and 0.116, respectively, for the whole data set. The prediction result of the LSSVM model is better than that obtained by the heuristic method and the reference, which proved LSSVM was a useful tool in the prediction of the solubility of C60. In addition, this paper provided a new and effective method for predicting the solubility of C60 from its structures and gave some insight into the structural features related to the solubility of C60 in different solvents.