Machine Learning for Silver Nanoparticle Electron Transfer Property Prediction

Nanoparticles exhibit diverse structural and morphological features that are often interconnected, making the correlation of structure/property relationships challenging. In this study a multi-structure/single-property relationship of silver nanoparticles is developed for the energy of Fermi level, which can be tuned to improve the transfer of electrons in a variety of applications. By combining different machine learning analytical algorithms, including k-mean, logistic regression, and random forest with electronic structure simulations, we find that the degree of twinning (characterized by the fraction of hexagonal closed packed atoms) and the population of the {111} facet (characterized by a surface coordination number of nine) are strongly correlated to the Fermi energy of silver nanoparticles. A concise three layer artificial neural network together with principal component analysis is built to predict this property, with reduced geometrical, structural, and topological features, making the method ideal for efficient and accurate high-throughput screening of large-scale virtual nanoparticle libraries and the creation of single-structure/single-property, multi-structure/single-property, and single-structure/multi-property relationships in the near future.