Infrared spectrum analysis of organic molecules with neural networks using standard reference data sets in combination with real-world data

In this study, we propose a neural network- based approach to analyze IR spectra and detect the presence of functional groups. Our neural network architecture is based on the concept of learning split representations. We demonstrate that our method achieves favorable validation performance using the NIST dataset. Furthermore, by incorporating additional data from the open-access research data repository Chemotion, we show that our model improves the classification performance for nitriles and amides. Scientific contribution: Our method exclusively uses IR data as input for a neural network, making its performance, unlike other well-performing models, independent of additional data types obtained from analytical measurements. Furthermore, our proposed method leverages a deep learning model that outperforms previous approaches, achieving F1 scores above 0.7 to identify 17 functional groups. By incorporating real-world data from various laboratories, we demonstrate how open-access, specialized research data repositories can serve as yet unexplored, valuable benchmark datasets for future machine learning research.