A critical examination of robustness and generalizability of machine learning prediction of materials properties

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have led to substantial performance improvement in material database benchmarks, but an excellent benchmark score may not imply good generalization performance. Here we show that ML models trained on Materials Project 2018 can have severely degraded performance on new compounds in Materials Project 2021 due to the distribution shift. We discuss how to foresee the issue with a few simple tools. Firstly, …