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Quantum machine learning using atom-in-molecule-based fragments selected on the fly

Nature Chemistry volume 12, pages 945–951 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

First-principles-based exploration of chemical space deepens our understanding of chemistry and might help with the design of new molecules, materials or experiments. Due to the computational cost of quantum chemistry methods and the immense number of theoretically possible stable compounds, comprehensive in silico screening remains prohibitive. To overcome this challenge, we combine atom-in-molecule-based fragments, dubbed ‘amons’ (A), with active learning in transferable quantum machine learning (ML) models. The efficiency, accuracy, scalability and transferability of the resulting AML models is demonstrated for important molecular quantum properties such as energies, forces, atomic charges, NMR shifts and polarizabilities and for systems including organic molecules, 2D materials, water clusters, Watson–Crick DNA base pairs and even ubiquitin. Conceptually, the AML approach extends Mendeleev’s table to account effectively for chemical environments, which allows the systematic reconstruction of many chemistries from local building blocks.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt.

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Fig. 1: ‘Amons’. Compositional extension of the periodic table.
Fig. 2: The amons of organic chemistry.
Fig. 3: Scalability of AML demonstrated by systematic improvement of predicted atomization energies (E) for two dozen important biomolecules using increasingly larger amons.
Fig. 4: Applicability of AML demonstrated by low prediction errors as function of training set size for various quantum properties.
Fig. 5: Significantly improved learning through amons selection for training compared to random selection.

Data availability

All data used in this paper are available at https://github.com/binghuang2018/aqml-datahttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3911072. All pertinent details are specified in the README file.

Code availability

Mixed Python/Fortran code (MIT licence, no restrictions) for generating amons, aSLATM/SLATM representation as well as AML models, along with detailed instructions on how to reproduce our results are available at https://github.com/binghuang2018/aqmlhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3742792.

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Acknowledgements

D. Bakowies is acknowledged for helpful discussions. O.A.v.L. acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (No. PP00P2_138932 and 407540 _167186 NFP 75 Big Data). This research was partly supported by NCCR MARVEL, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Calculations were performed at the sciCORE scientific computing core facility (http://scicore.unibas.ch/) at the University of Basel.

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  1. Institute of Physical Chemistry and National Center for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (MARVEL), Department of Chemistry, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Bing Huang & O. Anatole von Lilienfeld

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  1. Bing Huang
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Contributions

B.H. and O.A.v.L. conceived the idea of amons, B.H. implemented the corresponding algorithms. B.H. and O.A.v.L. designed all model systems for testing purposes and B.H. carried out all calculations. Both authors analysed the results and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to O. Anatole von Lilienfeld.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–14.

Supplementary Video 1

VR recording of the 1,000 most frequent amons of the QM9 dataset.

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Huang, B., von Lilienfeld, O.A. Quantum machine learning using atom-in-molecule-based fragments selected on the fly. Nat. Chem. 12, 945–951 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-020-0527-z

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