The estimation of
chemical reaction properties such as activation
energies, rates, or yields is a central topic of computational chemistry.
In contrast to molecular properties, where machine learning approaches
such as graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have excelled
for a wide variety of tasks, no general and transferable adaptations
of GCNNs for reactions have been developed yet. We therefore combined
a popular cheminformatics reaction representation, the so-called condensed
graph of reaction (CGR), with a recent GCNN architecture to arrive
at a versatile, robust, and compact deep learning model. The CGR is
a superposition of the reactant and product graphs of a chemical reaction
and thus an ideal input for graph-based machine learning approaches.
The model learns to create a data-driven, task-dependent reaction
embedding that does not rely on expert knowledge, similar to current
molecular GCNNs. Our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art
models in accuracy, is applicable even to imbalanced reactions, and
possesses excellent predictive capabilities for diverse target properties,
such as activation energies, reaction enthalpies, rate constants,
yields, or reaction classes. We furthermore curated a large set of
atom-mapped reactions along with their target properties, which can
serve as benchmark data sets for future work. All data sets and the
developed reaction GCNN model are available online, free of charge,
and open source.