The use of quantitative structure–property
relationships is proposed for the calculation of temperature
of 10 % mass loss (T10) for a number of 50 optically active
polymers. The descriptors involved in these models were
calculated from the structures of the repeating units. The
important descriptors were selected applying genetic
algorithm–partial least squares (GA–PLS) technique.
A PLS method was used to select the best descriptors and
the selected descriptors were used as inputs for support
vector machine (SVM) model. The root mean square errors
for the SVM calculated T10 of training and prediction sets
are 9.842 and 10.384, respectively, which are smaller than
those obtained by PLS model (27.970 and 34.416,
respectively). The results obtained showed the ability of the
developed SVM to predict T10 of various chiral polymers.
Also results revealed the superiority of the SVM over the
PLS model.