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In this paper, we compare the most popular Atom-to-Atom Mapping (AAM) tools: ChemAxon,([1]) Indigo,([2]) RDTool,([3]) NameRXN (NextMove),([4]) and RXNMapper([5]) which implement different AAM algorithms. An open-source RDTool program was optimized, and its modified version ("new RDTool") was considered together with several consensus mapping strategies. The Condensed Graph of Reaction approach was used to calculate chemical distances and develop the "AAM fixer" algorithm for an automatized correction of erroneous mapping. The benchmarking calculations were performed on a Golden dataset containing 1851 manually mapped and curated reactions. The best performing RXNMapper program together with the AMM Fixer was applied to map the USPTO database. The Golden dataset, mapped USPTO and optimized RDTool are available in the GitHub repository https://github.com/Laboratoire-de-Chemoinformatique.

In this article, we consider cross-validation of the quantitative structure-property relationship models for reactions and show that the conventional k-fold cross-validation (CV) procedure gives an `optimistically' biased assessment of prediction performance. To address this issue, we suggest two strategies of model cross-validation, `transformation-out' CV, and `solvent-out' CV. Unlike the conventional k-fold cross-validation approach that does not consider the nature of objects, the proposed procedures provide an unbiased estimation of the predictive performance of the models for novel types of structural transformations in chemical reactions and reactions going under new conditions. Both the suggested strategies have been applied to predict the rate constants of bimolecular elimination and nucleophilic substitution reactions, and Diels-Alder cycloaddition. All suggested cross-validation methodologies and tutorial are implemented in the open-source software package CIMtools (https://github.com/cimm-kzn/CIMtools).

Nowadays, the problem of the model's applicability domain (AD) definition is an active research topic in chemoinformatics. Although many various AD definitions for the models predicting properties of molecules (Quantitative Structure-Activity/Property Relationship (QSAR/QSPR) models) were described in the literature, no one for chemical reactions (Quantitative Reaction-Property Relationships (QRPR)) has been reported to date. The point is that a chemical reaction is a much more complex object than an individual molecule, and its yield, thermodynamic and kinetic characteristics depend not only on the structures of reactants and products but also on experimental conditions. The QRPR models' performance largely depends on the way that chemical transformation is encoded. In this study, various AD definition methods extensively used in QSAR/QSPR studies of individual molecules, as well as several novel approaches suggested in this work for reactions, were benchmarked on several reaction datasets. The ability to exclude wrong reaction types, increase coverage, improve the model performance and detect Y-outliers were tested. As a result, several "best" AD definitions for the QRPR models predicting reaction characteristics have been revealed and tested on a previously published external dataset with a clear AD definition problem.