Advances in renewable and sustainable energy technologies critically depend on our ability to design and realize materials with optimal properties. Materials discovery and design efforts ideally involve close coupling between materials prediction, synthesis and characterization. Increased use of computational tools, the generation of materials databases, and advances in experimental methods have substantially accelerated these activities. […]

Ongoing, rapid innovations in fields ranging from microelectronics, aerospace, and automotive to defense, energy, and health demand new advanced materials at even greater rates and lower costs. Traditional materials R&D methods offer few paths to achieve both outcomes simultaneously. Materials informatics, while a nascent field, offers such a promise through screening, growing databases of materials […]

Traditional machine learning (ML) metrics overestimate model performance for materials discovery. We introduce (1) leave-one-cluster-out cross-validation (LOCO CV) and (2) a simple nearest-neighbor benchmark to show that model performance in discovery applications strongly depends on the problem, data sampling, and extrapolation. Our results suggest that ML-guided iterative experimentation may outperform standard high-throughput screening for discovering […]

Data-driven materials research requires two key supporting components: data infrastructure and informatics. In this chapter, we review the state of the art in materials data infrastructure, focusing in detail on four infrastructure projects spanning academia, government, and industry. We also discuss data standards as an enabling step on the path to community-scale materials data infrastructure. […]

As data-driven methods rise in popularity in materials science applications, a key question is how these machine learning models can be used to understand microstructure. Given the importance of process–structure–property relations throughout materials science, it seems logical that models that can leverage microstructural data would be more capable of predicting property information. While there have […]

Despite increasing focus on data publication and discovery in materials science and related fields, the global view of materials data is highly sparse. This sparsity encourages training models on the union of multiple datasets, but simple unions can prove problematic as (ostensibly) equivalent properties may be measured or computed differently depending on the data source. […]

We evaluate the performance of four machine learning methods for modeling and predicting FCC solute diffusion barriers. More than 200 FCC solute diffusion barriers from previous density functional theory (DFT) calculations served as our dataset to train four machine learning methods: linear regression (LR), decision tree (DT), Gaussian kernel ridge regression (GKRR), and artificial neural […]

In this review, we discuss current and potential future applications for materials informatics in industry. We include in this discussion not only the traditional materials and chemical industries, but also other manufacturing-intensive sectors, which broadens the relevance of materials informatics to a large proportion of the economy. We describe several high-level use cases, drawing upon […]

The optimization of composition and processing to obtain materials that exhibit desirable characteristics has historically relied on a combination of scientist intuition, trial and error, and luck. We propose a methodology that can accelerate this process by fitting data-driven models to experimental data as it is collected to suggest which experiment should be performed next. […]

A machine-learning model has been trained to discover Heusler compounds, which are intermetallics exhibiting diverse physical properties attractive for applications in thermoelectric and spintronic materials. Improving these properties requires knowledge of crystal structures, which occur in three subtle variations (Heusler, inverse Heusler, and CsCl-type structures) that are difficult, and at times impossible, to distinguish by […]