GOWAWA Aggregation Operator-based Global Molecular Characterizations: Weighting Atom/bond Contributions (LOVIs/LOEIs) According to their Influence in the Molecular Encoding

A different perspective to compute global weighted definitions of molecular descriptors from the contributions of each atom (LOVIs) or covalent bond (LOEIs) within a molecule is presented, using the generalized ordered weighted averaging - weighted averaging (GOWAWA) aggregation operator. This operator is rather different from the other norm-, mean- and statistic-based operators used up to date for the descriptors calculation from LOVIs/LOEIs. GOWAWA unifies the generalized ordered weighted averaging (GOWA) and the weighted generalized mean (WGM) functions and, in addition, it uses a smoothing parameter to assign different importance values to both functions depending on the problem under study. With the GOWAWA operator, diversity of novel global aggregations of molecular descriptors can be determined, where the influence that each atom (or covalent bond) has on the molecular characterization is taken into account. Therefore, this approach is completely different from the ones reported in the literature, where the values of LOVIs/LOEIs are considered equally important. To demonstrate the feasibility of using this operator, the QuBiLS-MIDAS descriptors (http://tomocomd.com/qubils-midas) were used and, as a result, a module was built into the corresponding software to compute them, being thus the only software reported in the literature that can be employed to determine weighted descriptors. Moreover, several modeling studies were performed on eight chemical datasets, which demonstrated that, with the GOWAWA aggregation operator, weighted QuBiLS-MIDAS descriptors that contribute to develop models with greater predictive power can be computed, if compared to the models based on the non-weighted descriptors calculated from the other operators used up to date. A non-parametric statistical assessment confirmed that the GOWAWA-based predictions are significantly superior to the others obtained. Therefore, all in all, it can be concluded that, from the results achieved, the GOWAWA operator constitutes a prominent alternative to codify relevant chemical information of the molecules, ultimately useful in improving the modeling ability of several old and recent descriptors whose definition is based on the LOVIs/LOEIs calculation.