Residual Neural Network Architectures to Improve Prediction Accuracy of Properties of Materials

Properties in material composition and crystal structures have been explored by density functional theory (DFT) calculations, using databases such as the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD). Databases like these have been used currently for the training of advanced machine learning and deep neural network models, the latter providing higher performance when predicting properties of materials. However, current alternatives have shown a deterioration in accuracy when increasing the number of layers in their architecture (over-fitting problem). As an alternative method to address this problem, we have implemented residual neural network architectures based on Merge and Run Networks, IRNet and UNet to improve performance while relaxing the observed network depth limitation. The evaluation of the proposed architectures include a 9:1 ratio to train and test as well as 10 fold cross validation. In the experiments we found that our proposed architectures based on IRNet and UNet are able to obtain a lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) than current strategies. The full implementation (Python, Tensorflow and Keras) and the trained networks will be available online for community validation and advancing the state of the art from our findings.