Symmetry-Adapted Domination Indices: The Enhanced Domination Sigma Index and Its Applications in QSPR Studies of Octane and Its Isomers

Abstract

Molecular descriptors are essential in mathematical chemistry for studying quantitative structure–property relationships (QSPRs), and topological indices are a valuable source of information about molecular properties, such as size, cyclicity, branching degree, and symmetry. Graph theory has played a crucial role in the development of topological indices and dominating parameters for molecular descriptors. A molecule graph, under graph isomorphism conditions, represents an invariant number, and the graph theory approach considers dominating sets, which are subsets of the vertex set where every vertex outside the set is adjacent to at least one vertex inside the set. The dominating sigma index, a topological index that incorporates the mathematical principles of domination topological indices and the sigma index, is applicable to some families of graphs, such as book graphs and windmill graphs, and some graph operations, which have exact values for this new index. To evaluate the effectiveness of the domination sigma index in QSPR studies, a comparative analysis was conducted to establish an appropriate domination index that correlates with the physicochemical properties of octane and its isomers. Linear and non-linear models were developed using the QSPR approach to predict the properties of interest, and the results show that both the domination forgotten and domination first Zagreb indices exhibited satisfactory performance in comparison testing. Further research into QSAR/QSPR domination indices is required to build more robust models for predicting the physicochemical properties of organic compounds while maintaining the importance of symmetry.