A Systematic Evaluation of Molecular Mixture Behavior Prediction

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Main Authors: Leenhouts, Roel J., Morgan, Nathan K., Green, William, Rittig, Jan G., Vermeire, Florence H.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Leenhouts, Roel J.
Morgan, Nathan K.
Green, William
Rittig, Jan G.
Vermeire, Florence H.
author_facet Leenhouts, Roel J.
Morgan, Nathan K.
Green, William
Rittig, Jan G.
Vermeire, Florence H.
contents Machine learning for molecular property prediction has focused largely on pure compounds, even though many practical applications depend on mixtures with intermolecular interactions. Recent work has expanded the availability of mixture datasets, but evaluation still focuses mainly on absolute accuracy. However, absolute errors in mixtures conflate pure-component contributions with deviations from ideal mixing. We propose an evaluation framework that decomposes mixture-property error into pure-compound and interaction (non-ideal) components. The framework combines leakage-aware split protocols, ideal-mixture baselines, and excess-property metrics. To support reproducible benchmarking, we curate seven matched pure and mixture physicochemical property datasets. Across multiple mixture-property tasks and model families, we find that strong absolute accuracy can mask poor recovery of non-ideal mixture behavior, and that performance drops substantially under strict molecule splits. These results identify transfer to unseen molecules as a central challenge in molecular mixture machine learning and motivate evaluation beyond absolute accuracy alone.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29698
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Systematic Evaluation of Molecular Mixture Behavior Prediction
Leenhouts, Roel J.
Morgan, Nathan K.
Green, William
Rittig, Jan G.
Vermeire, Florence H.
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Machine learning for molecular property prediction has focused largely on pure compounds, even though many practical applications depend on mixtures with intermolecular interactions. Recent work has expanded the availability of mixture datasets, but evaluation still focuses mainly on absolute accuracy. However, absolute errors in mixtures conflate pure-component contributions with deviations from ideal mixing. We propose an evaluation framework that decomposes mixture-property error into pure-compound and interaction (non-ideal) components. The framework combines leakage-aware split protocols, ideal-mixture baselines, and excess-property metrics. To support reproducible benchmarking, we curate seven matched pure and mixture physicochemical property datasets. Across multiple mixture-property tasks and model families, we find that strong absolute accuracy can mask poor recovery of non-ideal mixture behavior, and that performance drops substantially under strict molecule splits. These results identify transfer to unseen molecules as a central challenge in molecular mixture machine learning and motivate evaluation beyond absolute accuracy alone.
title A Systematic Evaluation of Molecular Mixture Behavior Prediction
topic Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29698