A quantitative uncertainty metric controls error in neural network-driven chemical discovery
Name
c9sc02298h.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.28 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
a3516586bc4bf9b1d4cf5be8c5326d76
Author(s)
Janet, Jon Paul
Duan, Chenru
Yang, Tzuhsiung
Nandy, Aditya
Kulik, Heather J.
Date Issued
July 2019
Journal
Chemical Science
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry. Machine learning (ML) models, such as artificial neural networks, have emerged as a complement to high-throughput screening, enabling characterization of new compounds in seconds instead of hours. The promise of ML models to enable large-scale chemical space exploration can only be realized if it is straightforward to identify when molecules and materials are outside the model's domain of applicability. Established uncertainty metrics for neural network models are either costly to obtain (e.g., ensemble models) or rely on feature engineering (e.g., feature space distances), and each has limitations in estimating prediction errors for chemical space exploration. We introduce the distance to available data in the latent space of a neural network ML model as a low-cost, quantitative uncertainty metric that works for both inorganic and organic chemistry. The calibrated performance of this approach exceeds widely used uncertainty metrics and is readily applied to models of increasing complexity at no additional cost. Tightening latent distance cutoffs systematically drives down predicted model errors below training errors, thus enabling predictive error control in chemical discovery or identification of useful data points for active learning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 unported license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1039/c9sc02298h
