Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Explainable machine learning in materials science

Journal Article · · npj Computational Materials
Abstract

Machine learning models are increasingly used in materials studies because of their exceptional accuracy. However, the most accurate machine learning models are usually difficult to explain. Remedies to this problem lie in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), an emerging research field that addresses the explainability of complicated machine learning models like deep neural networks (DNNs). This article attempts to provide an entry point to XAI for materials scientists. Concepts are defined to clarify what explain means in the context of materials science. Example works are reviewed to show how XAI helps materials science research. Challenges and opportunities are also discussed.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program; USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344
OSTI ID:
1888837
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2007609
Report Number(s):
LLNL--JRNL-833293; 204; PII: 884
Journal Information:
npj Computational Materials, Journal Name: npj Computational Materials Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 8; ISSN 2057-3960
Publisher:
Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United Kingdom
Language:
English

References (115)

Better, Faster, and Less Biased Machine Learning: Electromechanical Switching in Ferroelectric Thin Films journal August 2020
Multi‐Layer Feature Selection Incorporating Weighted Score‐Based Expert Knowledge toward Modeling Materials with Targeted Properties journal January 2020
A Survey on Deep Transfer Learning book January 2018
The (Un)reliability of Saliency Methods book January 2019
Quantum-Chemical Insights from Interpretable Atomistic Neural Networks book January 2019
Gradient-Based Attribution Methods book January 2019
DeepRED – Rule Extraction from Deep Neural Networks book January 2016
Definitions and properties of zero-knowledge proof systems journal December 1994
A theory of learning from different domains journal October 2009
Reverse Engineering the Neural Networks for Rule Extraction in Classification Problems journal December 2011
Visualizing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using Natural Pre-images journal May 2016
A Comparative Study of Feature Selection Methods for Stress Hotspot Classification in Materials journal June 2018
Microstructure Cluster Analysis with Transfer Learning and Unsupervised Learning journal August 2018
Benchmark AFLOW Data Sets for Machine Learning journal May 2020
Informing Mechanical Model Development Using Lower-Dimensional Descriptions of Lattice Distortion journal December 2020
Occam's Razor journal April 1987
Survey and critique of techniques for extracting rules from trained artificial neural networks journal December 1995
Influence of microstructure on the ionic conductivity of yttria-stabilized zirconia electrolyte journal September 2002
Twinning-related grain boundary engineering journal August 2004
Microstructure reconstructions from 2-point statistics using phase-recovery algorithms journal March 2008
Microstructure recognition using convolutional neural networks for prediction of ionic conductivity in ceramics journal December 2017
Material structure-property linkages using three-dimensional convolutional neural networks journal March 2018
Establishing structure-property localization linkages for elastic deformation of three-dimensional high contrast composites using deep learning approaches journal March 2019
Dramatically Enhanced Combination of Ultimate Tensile Strength and Electric Conductivity of Alloys via Machine Learning Screening journal November 2020
A machine learning-based alloy design system to facilitate the rational design of high entropy alloys with enhanced hardness journal January 2022
Non-intrusive reduced order modeling of natural convection in porous media using convolutional autoencoders: Comparison with linear subspace techniques journal February 2022
Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences journal February 2019
Physics-aware Gaussian processes in remote sensing journal July 2018
Advanced microstructure classification by data mining methods journal June 2018
MatCALO: Knowledge-enabled machine learning in materials science journal June 2019
Machine learning in materials science: From explainable predictions to autonomous design journal June 2021
Methods for interpreting and understanding deep neural networks journal February 2018
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI journal June 2020
Notions of explainability and evaluation approaches for explainable artificial intelligence journal December 2021
Physics-informed neural networks: A deep learning framework for solving forward and inverse problems involving nonlinear partial differential equations journal February 2019
A physics-aware, probabilistic machine learning framework for coarse-graining high-dimensional systems in the Small Data regime journal November 2019
A fast and accurate physics-informed neural network reduced order model with shallow masked autoencoder journal February 2022
Hall-Petch relationship in Mg alloys: A review journal February 2018
Predicting compressive strength of consolidated molecular solids using computer vision and deep learning journal May 2020
Building data-driven models with microstructural images: Generalization and interpretability journal December 2017
Learning acoustic emission signatures from a nanoindentation-based lithography process: Towards rapid microstructure characterization journal March 2020
Towards better analysis of machine learning models: A visual analytics perspective journal March 2017
Four-Dimensional Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (4D-STEM): From Scanning Nanodiffraction to Ptychography and Beyond journal May 2019
Interpretable and Explainable Machine Learning for Materials Science and Chemistry journal June 2022
Machine Learning and Statistical Analysis for Materials Science: Stability and Transferability of Fingerprint Descriptors and Chemical Insights journal May 2017
SchNetPack: A Deep Learning Toolbox For Atomistic Systems journal November 2018
Deep Learning for Optoelectronic Properties of Organic Semiconductors journal March 2020
Molecular Transformer: A Model for Uncertainty-Calibrated Chemical Reaction Prediction journal August 2019
Leveraging Uncertainty from Deep Learning for Trustworthy Material Discovery Workflows journal May 2021
Attribution-Driven Explanation of the Deep Neural Network Model via Conditional Microstructure Image Synthesis journal January 2022
Sinterability of commercial 8 mol% yttria-stabilized zirconia powders and the effect of sintered density on the ionic conductivity journal September 1998
Machine-learning-assisted materials discovery using failed experiments journal May 2016
Quantum-chemical insights from deep tensor neural networks journal January 2017
Insightful classification of crystal structures using deep learning journal July 2018
State-of-the-art augmented NLP transformer models for direct and single-step retrosynthesis journal November 2020
Quantitative interpretation explains machine learning models for chemical reaction prediction and uncovers bias journal March 2021
Using machine learning and a data-driven approach to identify the small fatigue crack driving force in polycrystalline materials journal July 2018
Fast and interpretable classification of small X-ray diffraction datasets using data augmentation and deep neural networks journal May 2019
Discovery of new materials using combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput characterization of thin-film materials libraries combined with computational methods journal July 2019
Recent advances and applications of machine learning in solid-state materials science journal August 2019
Identification of advanced spin-driven thermoelectric materials via interpretable machine learning journal October 2019
Reliable and explainable machine-learning methods for accelerated material discovery journal November 2019
Application of a long short-term memory for deconvoluting conductance contributions at charged ferroelectric domain walls journal October 2020
Interpretable machine-learning strategy for soft-magnetic property and thermal stability in Fe-based metallic glasses journal December 2020
Machine-learning informed prediction of high-entropy solid solution formation: Beyond the Hume-Rothery rules journal May 2020
Compositionally restricted attention-based network for materials property predictions journal May 2021
A study of real-world micrograph data quality and machine learning model robustness journal October 2021
Efficient and interpretable graph network representation for angle-dependent properties applied to optical spectroscopy journal July 2022
High-throughput calculations of magnetic topological materials journal October 2020
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold journal July 2021
ElemNet: Deep Learning the Chemistry of Materials From Only Elemental Composition journal December 2018
Machine-learning guided discovery of a new thermoelectric material journal February 2019
Physics-informed machine learning journal May 2021
Mapping the space of chemical reactions using attention-based neural networks journal January 2021
Perspective: Machine learning potentials for atomistic simulations journal November 2016
SchNet – A deep learning architecture for molecules and materials journal June 2018
The Deformation and Ageing of Mild Steel: III Discussion of Results journal September 1951
How to represent crystal structures for machine learning: Towards fast prediction of electronic properties journal May 2014
Molecular Dynamics with On-the-Fly Machine Learning of Quantum-Mechanical Forces journal March 2015
Big Data of Materials Science: Critical Role of the Descriptor journal March 2015
SISSO: A compressed-sensing method for identifying the best low-dimensional descriptor in an immensity of offered candidates journal August 2018
A database for handwritten text recognition research journal May 1994
ANN-DT: an algorithm for extraction of decision trees from artificial neural networks journal January 1999
Peeking Inside the Black-Box: A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) journal January 2018
Explainable Machine Learning for Scientific Insights and Discoveries journal January 2020
Explaining CNN and RNN Using Selective Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation journal January 2021
ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database
  • Deng, Jia; Dong, Wei; Socher, Richard
  • 2009 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPR Workshops), 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848
conference June 2009
Deep neural networks are easily fooled: High confidence predictions for unrecognizable images conference June 2015
Deep filter banks for texture recognition and segmentation conference June 2015
Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization conference June 2016
Network Dissection: Quantifying Interpretability of Deep Visual Representations conference July 2017
Plug & Play Generative Networks: Conditional Iterative Generation of Images in Latent Space conference July 2017
Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks conference June 2018
Explainability Methods for Graph Convolutional Neural Networks conference June 2019
CNN Features Off-the-Shelf: An Astounding Baseline for Recognition conference June 2014
Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning conference October 2018
Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-Based Localization conference October 2017
Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks conference October 2019
AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want journal November 2019
Theory-Guided Data Science: A New Paradigm for Scientific Discovery from Data journal October 2017
Informed Machine Learning - A Taxonomy and Survey of Integrating Prior Knowledge into Learning Systems journal January 2021
Evaluating the Visualization of What a Deep Neural Network Has Learned journal November 2017
Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data journal April 2009
The WEKA data mining software: an update journal November 2009
"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier
  • Ribeiro, Marco Tulio; Singh, Sameer; Guestrin, Carlos
  • Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - KDD '16 https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939778
conference January 2016
XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System conference January 2016
A Survey of Methods for Explaining Black Box Models journal January 2019
The Mythos of Model Interpretability: In machine learning, the concept of interpretability is both important and slippery. journal June 2018
Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (with comments and a rejoinder by the author) journal August 2001
On Pixel-Wise Explanations for Non-Linear Classifier Decisions by Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation journal July 2015
A Decomposable Attention Model for Natural Language Inference conference January 2016
Feature Visualization journal November 2017
Case-Based Reasoning: Foundational Issues, Methodological Variations, and System Approaches journal January 1994
SHAP and LIME: An Evaluation of Discriminative Power in Credit Risk journal September 2021
The Best Way to Select Features? Comparing MDA, LIME, and SHAP journal December 2020

Similar Records

XElemNet: towards explainable AI for deep neural networks in materials science
Journal Article · Wed Oct 23 20:00:00 EDT 2024 · Scientific Reports · OSTI ID:2473509

Evaluating the Trustworthiness of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Methods Applied to Regression Predictions of Arctic Sea Ice Motion
Journal Article · Tue Dec 31 19:00:00 EST 2024 · Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems · OSTI ID:2526286

Related Subjects