Thermally
activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) material has attracted
great attention as a promising metal-free organic light-emitting diode
material with a high theoretical efficiency. To accelerate the discovery
of novel TADF materials, computer-aided material design strategies
have been developed. However, they have clear limitations due to the
accessibility of only a few computationally tractable properties.
Here, we propose TADF-likeness, a quantitative score to evaluate the
TADF potential of molecules based on a data-driven concept of chemical
similarity to existing TADF molecules. We used a deep autoencoder
to characterize the common features of existing TADF molecules with
common chemical descriptors. The score was highly correlated with
the four essential electronic properties of TADF molecules and had
a high success rate in large-scale virtual screening of millions of
molecules to identify promising candidates at almost no cost, validating
its feasibility for accelerating TADF discovery. The concept of TADF-likeness
can be extended to other fields of materials discovery.