Leveraging Machine Learning in Materials Science Challenges, Opportunities, and Solutions

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2025-10-25

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Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), Islamic University of Technology(IUT), Board Bazar, Gazipur-1704, Bangladesh

Abstract

The discovery of new materials, particularly perovskites, plays a crucial role in advancing technologies in energy and electronics. Traditional approaches to finding new materials experimental synthesis and computer simulations can be time- consuming and costly. This thesis specifically explores the application of machine learning (ML) for a more effective additive material prediction, taking perovskite materials classified for formability and stability properties as examples. We introduce an advanced ML architecture employing complex algorithms that can predict material properties and tackle issues such as class imbalance in materials databases. SMOTE and Random Oversampling are two standard sampling methods that unfortunately do not work well with materials science datasets, as they tend to be very noisy and unbalanced. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel hybrid sampling approach named Difficulty-Directed Hybrid Sampling (DD-Hybrid). This weak method utilizes oversampling of informative minority samples and pruning of majority class instances already informed about redundancy. This approach has the advantage of making ML models more robust and stronger in a situation of unbalanced data with important but rare instances (i.e., stable structures are poorly represented). The experimental results demonstrate that DD-Hybrid outperforms the existing methods of SMOTE, Random Oversampling and improves classification accuracy and prediction of material properties as well. This paper demonstrates how ML might transform materials science, particularly through correcting any data imbalance and scaling models using the proposed algorithm.

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Supervised by Mr. Asif Newaz, Lecturer, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) Islamic University of Technology (IUT) Board Bazar, Gazipur, Bangladesh This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2025

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