Semiempirical quantum chemical method and artificial neural networks applied for λmax computation of some azo dyes

The maximum absorption wavelengths of 31 azo dyes have been calculated by two comprehensive methods using the semiempirical quantum chemical method, PM3, and the weight decay based artificial neural network (WD-ANN) or the early stopping based artificial neural network (ES-ANN). The average absolute errors of WD-ANN and that of ES-ANN are 10.07 nm and 12.40 nm, respectively. These results are much better than the results using ZINDO/S with the default value (0.585) only.