Similarity Measure for Molecular Structure: A Brief Review

Abstract

Similarity or distance measures have been used widely to calculate the similarity or dissimilarity between two samples of dataset. Cheminformatics is known as the domain that dealing with chemical information and both similarity and distance coefficient have been an important role for matching, searching and classification of chemical information. There are various types of similarity/distance coefficient used in molecular structure similarity searching. Generally, the calculation using similarity/distance coefficient is focusing more on 2-dimensional (2D) rather than 3-dimensional (3D) structure. In this paper, the popular similarity/distance coefficients for molecular structure will be reviewed together with the review on 3D molecular structure.