Hierarchical modeling of molecular energies using a deep neural network

We introduce the Hierarchically Interacting Particle Neural Network (HIP-NN) to model molecular properties from datasets of quantum calculations. Inspired by a many-body expansion, HIP-NN decomposes properties, such as energy, as a sum over hierarchical terms. These terms are generated from a neural network--a composition of many nonlinear transformations--acting on a representation of the molecule. HIP-NN achieves state-of-the-art performance on a dataset of 131k ground state organic molecules, and predicts energies with 0.26 kcal/mol mean absolute error. With minimal tuning, our model is also competitive on a dataset of molecular dynamics trajectories. In addition to enabling accurate energy predictions, the hierarchical structure of HIP-NN helps to identify regions of model uncertainty.