COMBO: An efficient Bayesian optimization library for materials science

Abstract

In many subfields of chemistry and physics, numerous attempts have been made to accelerate scientific discovery using data-driven experimental design algorithms. Among them, Bayesian optimization has been proven to be an effective tool. A standard implementation (e.g., scikit-learn), however, can accommodate only small training data. We designed an efficient protocol for Bayesian optimization that employs Thompson sampling, random feature maps, one-rank Cholesky update and automatic hyperparameter tuning, and implemented it as an open-source python library called COMBO (COMmon Bayesian Optimization library). Promising results using COMBO to determine the atomic structure of a crystalline interface are presented. COMBO is available at https://github.com/tsudalab/combo.