Ensemble learning of X-ray Absorption Spectra

Chen’s paper on “Automated generation and ensemble-learned matching of X-ray absorption spectra” has been published in npj Computational Materials. In this work, we developed XASdb, a large database of computed reference X-ray absorption spectra (XAS), and a novel Ensemble-Learned Spectra IdEntification (ELSIE) algorithm for the matching of spectra. XASdb currently hosts more than 800,000 K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge spectra (XANES) for over 40,000 materials from the open-science Materials Project database. We will demonstrate that the ELSIE algorithm, which combines 33 weak “learners” comprising a set of preprocessing steps and a similarity metric, can achieve up to 84.2% accuracy in identifying the correct oxidation state and coordination environment. The XASdb with the ELSIE algorithm has been integrated into a web application in the Materials Project, providing an important new public resource for the analysis of XAS to all materials researchers. Finally, the ELSIE algorithm itself has been made available as part of Veidt, an open source machine learning library for materials science.