Challenges and Issues on Artificial Hydrocarbon Networks: The Chemical Nature of Data-Driven Approaches

Inspiration in nature has been widely explored, from macro to micro-scale. When looking into chemical phenomena, stability and organization are two properties that emerge. Recently, artificial hydrocarbon networks (AHN), a supervised learning method inspired in the inner structures and mechanisms of chemical compounds, have been proposed as a data-driven approach in artificial intelligence. AHN have been successfully applied in data-driven approaches, such as: regression and classification models, control systems, signal processing, and robotics. To do so, molecules –the basic units of information in AHN– play an important role in the stability, organization and interpretability of this method. Interpretability, saving computing resources, and predictability have been handled by AHN, as any other machine learning model. This short paper aims to highlight the challenges, issues and trends of artificial hydrocarbon networks as a data-driven method. Throughout this document, it presents a description of the main insights of AHN and the efforts to tackle interpretability and training acceleration. Potential applications and future trends on AHN are also discussed.