Discovering novel materials can be greatly accelerated by iterative machine learning-informed proposal of candidates—active learning. However, standard global error metrics for model quality are not predictive of discovery performance, and can be misleading. We introduce the notion of Pareto shell error to help judge the suitability of a model for proposing material candidates. Further, through […]

Materials discovery is often compared to the challenge of finding a needle in a haystack. While much work has focused on accurately predicting the properties of candidate materials with machine learning (ML), which amounts to evaluating whether a given candidate is a piece of straw or a needle, less attention has been paid to a […]

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. […]