Machine learning aided design of perovskite oxide materials for photocatalytic water splitting

Suffering from the inefficient traditional trial-and-error methods and the huge searching space filled by millions of candidates, discovering new perovskite visible photocatalysts with higher hydrogen production rate (R-H2) still remains a challenge in the field of photocatalytic water splitting (PWS). Herein, we established structural-property models targeted to R-H2 and the proper bandgap (E-g) via machine learning (ML) technology to accelerate the discovery of efficient perovskite photocatalysts for PWS. The Pearson correlation coefficients (R) of leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) were adopted to compare the performances of different algorithms including gradient boosting regression (GBR), support vector regression (SVR), backpropagation artificial neural network (BPANN), and random forest (RF). It was found that the BPANN model showed the highest R values from LOOCV and testing data of 0.9897 and 0.9740 for R-H2, while the GBR model had the best values of 0.9290 and 0.9207 for E-g. Furtherly, 14 potential PWS perovskite candidates were screened out from 30,000 ABO(3)-type perovskite structures under the criteria of structural stability, E-g, conduction band energy, valence band energy and R-H2. The average R-H2 of these 14 perovskites is 6.4% higher than the highest value in the training data set. Moreover, the online web servers were developed to share our prediction models, which could be accessible in http://materialsdata-mining.com/ocpmdm/material_api/ahfga3d9puqlknig (E-g prediction) and http://materials-data-mining.com/ocpmdm/material_api/i0ucuyn3wsd14940 (R-H2 prediction). (C) 2021 Science Press and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. and Science Press. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study utilized machine learning technology to establish structural-property models to accelerate the discovery of efficient perovskite photocatalysts, with the BPANN model showing the highest performance for hydrogen production rate and the GBR model excelling in bandgap prediction. Through screening, 14 potential perovskite candidates were identified.