Reaction-agnostic featurization of bidentate ligands for Bayesian ridge regression of enantioselectivity

Data-driven approaches, in contrast to screening procedures based on intuition, have the potential to reduce the time and resources needed for reaction optimization by more rapidly identifying an ideal catalyst. These approaches, however, are often non-transferable and cannot be applied across different reactions.

To overcome this drawback, we introduce a general featurization strategy for bidentate ligands that is coupled with an automated feature selection pipeline and Bayesian ridge regression to perform multivariate linear regression modeling. This approach, which is applicable to any reaction, incorporates electronic, steric, and topological features (rigidity/flexibility, branching, geometry, constitution) and is well-suited for early-stage ligand optimization.