Predicting Crystal Structures with Data Mining of Quantum Calculations

Predicting and characterizing the crystal structure of materials is a key problem in materials research and development. It is typically addressed with highly accurate quantum mechanical computations on a small set of candidate structures, or with empirical rules that have been extracted from a large amount of experimental information, but have limited predictive power. In this Letter, we transfer the concept of heuristic rule extraction to a large library of ab initio calculated information, and we demonstrate that this can be developed into a tool for crystal structure prediction.