Data-Driven Insights into the Transition-Metal-Catalyzed Asymmetric Hydrogenation of Olefins

The transition-metal-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenation
of olefins is one of the key transformations with great utility in
various industrial applications. The field has been dominated by the
use of noble metal catalysts, such as iridium and rhodium. The reactions
with the earth-abundant cobalt metal have increased only in recent
years. In this work, we analyze the large amount of literature data
available on iridium- and rhodium-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenation.
The limited data on reactions using Co catalysts are then examined
in the context of Ir and Rh to obtain a better understanding of the
reactivity pattern. A detailed data-driven study of the types of olefins,
ligands, and reaction conditions such as solvent, temperature, and
pressure is carried out. Our analysis provides an understanding of
the literature trends and demonstrates that only a few olefin–ligand
combinations or reaction conditions are frequently used. The knowledge
of this bias in the literature data toward a certain group of substrates
or reaction conditions can be useful for practitioners to design new
reaction data sets that are suitable to obtain meaningful predictions
from machine-learning models.