Fig. 1: Overview of the framework.

a Comparison of the human experience and artificial intelligence (AI) experience, exemplified by the task of separating mixtures. b Chemical expertise concerning the determination of the separation conditions in column chromatography (CC) through the retardation factor (RF) values of thin-layer chromatography (TLC) when separating mixtures. c The data-driven rationale for the chemists’ experience via statistics and interpretable machine learning through the experimental dataset acquired from the automated platform. The numbers in the figure are from the statistics of the dataset.