Neural networks evaluating NMR data: an approach to visualize similarities and relationships of sol-gel derived inorganic-organic and organometallic hybrid polymers.

An artificial neural network (ANN)--the Kohonen Self-Organizing Feature Map (SOM)-is used to evaluate solid-state NMR spectroscopic derived data of 72 siloxane-based phosphine and organometallic functionalized hybrid polymers. The data set consists of parameters that describe their structural features and their dynamic behavior. The ANN visualizes similarities of the investigated compounds by reducing the dimension of the data set. This allows a comparison of these polymers that was not possible beforehand because of their structural diversity.