Issue 4, 2024

Insights into machine learning models from chemical physics: an energy landscapes approach (EL for ML)

Abstract

The study of energy landscapes as a conceptual framework, and a source of novel computational tools, is an active area of research in chemistry and physics. The energy landscape provides insight into structure, dynamics, and thermodynamics when combined with tools from statistical mechanics and unimolecular rate theory. This approach can also be applied to questions that arise in machine learning. Here, the loss landscape (LL) of a machine learning system is treated in the same way as the energy landscape for a molecular system. In this contribution we summarise and discuss applications of energy landscapes for machine learning (EL4ML). We will outline how various physical properties find analogues in machine learning systems, and show how these properties can be employed to both increase understanding of the machine learning ‘black-box’ and enhance the performance of machine learning models.

Graphical abstract: Insights into machine learning models from chemical physics: an energy landscapes approach (EL for ML)

Article information

Article type
Tutorial Review
Submitted
09 Oct 2023
Accepted
26 Jan 2024
First published
08 Feb 2024
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Digital Discovery, 2024,3, 637-648

Insights into machine learning models from chemical physics: an energy landscapes approach (EL for ML)

M. P. Niroomand, L. Dicks, E. O. Pyzer-Knapp and D. J. Wales, Digital Discovery, 2024, 3, 637 DOI: 10.1039/D3DD00204G

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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