Quantitative structure-property atomic partial charges

Spatial autocorrelation is a quantitative measure of the probability of finding objects of defined properties within a distance of interest [9, 10]. The concept of autocorrelation is mainly applied in fields such as geography, economics, ecology or meteorology to describe the spatial distribution of features. The idea of a molecular descriptor based on the autocorrelation concept was first introduced into the field of cheminformatics by Moreau and Broto in 1980 [11] with the ATS (autocorrelation of a topological structure) descriptor. For this approach, the atoms of a molecule were represented by properties such as atomic mass or partial charge. The distance between atoms was measured as the number of bonds between the respective atoms (topological distance). 

---