Machine learning with force-field-inspired descriptors for materials: Fast screening and mapping energy landscape

We present a complete set of chemo-structural descriptors to significantly extend the applicability of machine-learning (ML) in material screening and mapping energy landscape for multicomponent systems. These new descriptors allow differentiating between structural prototypes, which is not possible using the commonly used chemical-only descriptors. Specifically, we demonstrate that the combination of pairwise radial, nearest neighbor, bond-angle, dihedral-angle and core-charge distributions plays an important role in predicting formation energies, bandgaps, static refractive indices, magnetic properties, and modulus of elasticity for three-dimensional (3D) materials as well as exfoliation energies of two-dimensional (2D) layered materials. The training data consists of 24549 bulk and 616 monolayer materials taken from JARVIS-DFT database. We obtained very accurate ML models using gradient boosting algorithm. Then we use the trained models to discover exfoliable 2D-layered materials satisfying specific property requirements. Additionally, we integrate our formation energy ML model with a genetic algorithm for structure search to verify if the ML model reproduces the DFT convex hull. This verification establishes a more stringent evaluation metric for the ML model than what commonly used in data sciences. Our learnt model is publicly available on the JARVIS-ML website (https://www.ctcms.nist.gov/jarvisml) property predictions of generalized materials.