A general quantitative structure–property relationship treatment for dielectric constants of polymers

The dielectric constant (ε) of a polymer represents the capacitance of the polymer relative to a vacuum and is important in many industrial applications. Nevertheless, accurate experimental ε values of polymers are often unavailable, and current prediction methods lack universality and suitability. Reported here is the development and testing of a new QSPR (quantitative structure property relationship) correlation of ε for polymers. The entire set of 57 polymers was divided into a training set of 45 polymers and a test set of 12 polymers according to Kennard and Stones algorithm. A nine‐descriptor model, with squared correlation coefficient ( R 2 ) of 0.9384 and standard error of estimation ( s ) of 0.0873, was produced by using the stepwise multilinear regression analysis (MLRA) on the training set. The reliability of the proposed model was further illustrated using various evaluation techniques: leave‐one‐out cross‐validation procedure, randomization tests, and validation through the test set. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2011. ©2011 Society of Plastics Engineers.