Calibration of uncertainty in the active learning of machine learning force fields

Adam Thomas-Mitchell, Glenn Ivan Hawe, P. L. A. Popelier

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
25 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

FFLUX is a Machine Learning Force Field that uses the Maximum Expected Prediction Error (MEPE) active learning algorithm to improve the efficiency of model training. MEPE uses the predictive uncertainty of a Gaussian Process to balance exploration and exploitation when selecting the next training sample. However, the predictive uncertainty of a Gaussian Process is unlikely to be accurate or precise immediately after training. We hypothesize that calibrating the uncertainty quantification within MEPE will improve active learning performance. We develop and test two methods to improve uncertainty estimates: post-hoc calibration of predictive uncertainty using the CRUDE algorithm, and replacing the Gaussian Process with a Student-t Process. We investigate the impact of these methods on MEPE for single sample and batch sample active learning. Our findings suggest that post-hoc calibration does not improve the performance of active learning using the MEPE method. However, we do find that the Student-t Process can outperform active learning strategies and random sampling using a Gaussian Process if the training set is sufficiently large.
Original languageEnglish
Article number045034
JournalMachine Learning: Science and Technology
Volume4
Issue number4
Early online date23 Nov 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished online - 23 Nov 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are grateful for the use of the computing resources from the Northern Ireland High Performance Computing (NI-HPC) service. We are also grateful to Yulian Manchev for providing the dataset. P L A P is grateful to the European Research Council (ERC) for the award of an Advanced Grant underwritten by the UKRI-funded Frontier Research grant EP/XO24393/1.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Keywords

  • machine learning force fields
  • Gaussian process regression (GPR)
  • calibration
  • Active learning
  • uncertainty quantification
  • active learning
  • Gaussian process

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