Materials informatics: a ‘hot topic’ area in materials science, aims to combine traditionally bio-led informatics with computational methodologies, supporting more efficient research by identifying strategies for time- and cost-effective analysis. The discovery and maturation of new materials has been outpaced by the thicket of data created by new combinatorial and high throughput analytical techniques. The elaboration of this "quantitative avalanche"—and the resulting complex, multi-factor analyses required to understand it—means that interest, investment, and research are revisiting informatics approaches as a solution. This work, from Krishna Rajan, the leading expert of the informatics approach to materials, seeks to break down the barriers between data management, quality standards, data mining, exchange, and storage and analysis, as a means of accelerating scientific research in materials science. This solutions-based reference synthesizes foundational physical, statistical, and mathematical content with emerging experimental and real-world applications, for interdisciplinary researchers and those new to the field. Identifies and analyzes interdisciplinary strategies (including combinatorial and high throughput approaches) that accelerate materials development cycle times and reduces associated costs Mathematical and computational analysis aids formulation of new structure-property correlations among large, heterogeneous, and distributed data sets Practical examples, computational tools, and software analysis benefits rapid identification of critical data and analysis of theoretical needs for future problems

This book deals with an information-driven approach to plan materials discovery and design, iterative learning. The authors present contrasting but complementary approaches, such as those based on high throughput calculations, combinatorial experiments or data driven discovery, together with machine-learning methods. Similarly, statistical methods successfully applied in other fields, such as biosciences, are presented. The content spans from materials science to information science to reflect the cross-disciplinary nature of the field. A perspective is presented that offers a paradigm (codesign loop for materials design) to involve iteratively learning from experiments and calculations to develop materials with optimum properties. Such a loop requires the elements of incorporating domain materials knowledge, a database of descriptors (the genes), a surrogate or statistical model developed to predict a given property with uncertainties, performing adaptive experimental design to guide the next experiment or calculation and aspects of high throughput calculations as well as experiments. The book is about manufacturing with the aim to halving the time to discover and design new materials. Accelerating discovery relies on using large databases, computation, and mathematics in the material sciences in a manner similar to the way used to in the Human Genome Initiative. Novel approaches are therefore called to explore the enormous phase space presented by complex materials and processes. To achieve the desired performance gains, a predictive capability is needed to guide experiments and computations in the most fruitful directions by reducing not successful trials. Despite advances in computation and experimental techniques, generating vast arrays of data; without a clear way of linkage to models, the full value of data driven discovery cannot be realized. Hence, along with experimental, theoretical and computational materials science, we need to add a “fourth leg’’ to our toolkit to make the “Materials Genome'' a reality, the science of Materials Informatics.

This book addresses the current status, challenges and future directions of data-driven materials discovery and design. It presents the analysis and learning from data as a key theme in many science and cyber related applications. The challenging open questions as well as future directions in the application of data science to materials problems are sketched. Computational and experimental facilities today generate vast amounts of data at an unprecedented rate. The book gives guidance to discover new knowledge that enables materials innovation to address grand challenges in energy, environment and security, the clearer link needed between the data from these facilities and the theory and underlying science. The role of inference and optimization methods in distilling the data and constraining predictions using insights and results from theory is key to achieving the desired goals of real time analysis and feedback. Thus, the importance of this book lies in emphasizing that the full value of knowledge driven discovery using data can only be realized by integrating statistical and information sciences with materials science, which is increasingly dependent on high throughput and large scale computational and experimental data gathering efforts. This is especially the case as we enter a new era of big data in materials science with the planning of future experimental facilities such as the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford (LCLS-II), the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (EXFEL) and MaRIE (Matter Radiation in Extremes), the signature concept facility from Los Alamos National Laboratory. These facilities are expected to generate hundreds of terabytes to several petabytes of in situ spatially and temporally resolved data per sample. The questions that then arise include how we can learn from the data to accelerate the processing and analysis of reconstructed microstructure, rapidly map spatially resolved properties from high throughput data, devise diagnostics for pattern detection, and guide experiments towards desired targeted properties. The authors are an interdisciplinary group of leading experts who bring the excitement of the nascent and rapidly emerging field of materials informatics to the reader.

Materials Informatics: Data-Driven Discovery in Materials Science outlines the value of adding an "informatics" dimension to the analysis of materials science phenomena, by processes which can permit one to gather and survey complex, multiscale information. Such informatics and combinatorial approaches have emerged as powerful tools in materials design and discovery, in much the same way that genomics and bioinformatics impacted the biological arena. Including topics like data mining and combinatorial experimentation, this book covers the current state of the field, and provides examples (via case studies) of the analysis of multivariate data on a wide array of materials systems.

Provides everything readers need to know for applying the power of informatics to materials science There is a tremendous interest in materials informatics and application of data mining to materials science. This book is a one-stop guide to the latest advances in these emerging fields. Bridging the gap between materials science and informatics, it introduces readers to up-to-date data mining and machine learning methods. It also provides an overview of state-of-the-art software and tools. Case studies illustrate the power of materials informatics in guiding the experimental discovery of new materials. Materials Informatics: Methods, Tools and Applications is presented in two parts?Methodological Aspects of Materials Informatics and Practical Aspects and Applications. The first part focuses on developments in software, databases, and high-throughput computational activities. Chapter topics include open quantum materials databases; the ICSD database; open crystallography databases; and more. The second addresses the latest developments in data mining and machine learning for materials science. Its chapters cover genetic algorithms and crystal structure prediction; MQSPR modeling in materials informatics; prediction of materials properties; amongst others. -Bridges the gap between materials science and informatics -Covers all the known methodologies and applications of materials informatics -Presents case studies that illustrate the power of materials informatics in guiding the experimental quest for new materials -Examines the state-of-the-art software and tools being used today Materials Informatics: Methods, Tools and Applications is a must-have resource for materials scientists, chemists, and engineers interested in the methods of materials informatics.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) and genetic programming (GP) have already emerged as two very effective computing strategies for constructing data-driven models for systems of scientific and engineering interest. However, coming up with accurate models or meta-models from noisy real-life data is often a formidable task due to their frequent association with high degrees of random noise, which might render an ANN or GP model either over- or underfitted. This problem has recently been tackled in two emerging algorithms, Evolutionary Neural Net (EvoNN) and Bi-objective Genetic Programming (BioGP), which utilize the concept of Pareto tradeoff and apply a bi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) in the basic framework of both ANNs and GP. These concepts are elaborated in detail in this chapter.

Custom design, manufacture, and deployment of new high performance materials for advanced technologies is critically dependent on the availability of invertible, high fidelity, structure-property-processing (SPP) linkages. Establishing these linkages presents a major challenge because of the need to cover unimaginably large dimensional spaces. Hierarchical Materials Informatics addresses objective, computationally efficient, mining of large ensembles of experimental and modeling datasets to extract this core materials knowledge. Furthermore, it aims to organize and present this high value knowledge in highly accessible forms to end users engaged in product design and design for manufacturing efforts. As such, this emerging field has a pivotal role in realizing the goals outlined in current strategic national initiatives such as the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) and the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP). This book presents the foundational elements of this new discipline as it relates to the design, development, and deployment of hierarchical materials critical to advanced technologies. Addresses a critical gap in new materials research and development by presenting a rigorous statistical framework for the quantification of microstructure Contains several case studies illustrating the use of modern data analytic tools on microstructure datasets (both experimental and modeling)