Density-of-states similarity descriptor for unsupervised learning from materials data

We develop a materials descriptor based on the electronic density-of-states (DOS) and investigate the similarity of materials based on it. As an application example, we study the Computational 2D Materials Database (C2DB) that hosts thousands of two-dimensional materials with their properties calculated by density-functional theory. Combining our descriptor with a clustering algorithm, we identify groups of materials with similar electronic structure. We introduce additional descriptors to characterize these clusters in terms of crystal structures, atomic compositions, and electronic configurations of their members. This allows us to rationalize the found (dis)similarities and to perform an automated exploratory and confirmatory analysis of the C2DB data. From this analysis, we find that the majority of clusters consist of isoelectronic materials sharing crystal symmetry, but we also identify outliers, i.e., materials whose similarity cannot be explained in this way.