Interpretable Machine Learning Enabled Inorganic Reaction Classification and Synthesis Condition Prediction

Data-driven synthesis planning with machine learning is a key step in the design and discovery of novel inorganic compounds with desirable properties. Inorganic materials synthesis is often guided by heuristics and chemists’ prior knowledge and experience, built upon experimental trial-and-error that can be both time and resource consuming. Recent developments in natural language processing have enabled large-scale text mining of scientific literature, providing open-source databases of synthesis information on realized compounds, material precursors, and reaction conditions (temperatures, times). We employ supervised classification machine learning (ML) models to distinguish between solid-state, sol–gel, and solution (hydrothermal, precipitation) synthesis routes based on specified reaction target material and/or precursor materials. We demonstrate regression ML models that are able to predict suitable temperatures and times for the crucial inorganic synthesis steps of calcination and sintering given the reaction target and precursor materials. We contrast this regression-based condition modeling with a conditional variational autoencoder neural network that can generate appropriate distributions for the synthesis conditions of interest. We evaluate model interpretability using the Shapley additive explanations approach to gain insight into factors influencing suitability of synthesis route and reaction conditions. We find that the aforementioned models are capable of learning subtle differences in target material composition, precursor compound identities, and choice of synthesis route that are present in the inorganic synthesis space. Moreover, they generalize well to unseen chemical entities, outperform common heuristics in the field, and show promise for predicting appropriate reaction routes and conditions for previously unsynthesized compounds of interest.