Physics‐based and data‐driven approaches for lifetime estimation under variable conditions: Application to organic light‐emitting diodes

The prognosis of organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs) not only requires early detection of a bearing defect, but also the capability to predict their life data under all operational scenarios. The use of sophisticated machine learning (ML) algorithms is undoubtedly becoming an increasingly exciting research direction, as these algorithms can yield high predictive models with minimal domain expertise. The central question of this perspective is: how well can ML models advance our ability to forecast the lifetime of OLEDs compared to the physics‐based models? In this paper, data‐driven methods, feed‐forward neural networks (FFNN), support vector machines (SVMs), k‐nearest neighbors (KNNs), partial least squares regression (PLSR), and decision trees (DTs), are used to predict the lifetime and reliability of OLEDs through analyzing the lumen degradation data collected from the accelerated lifetime test. The final predicted results indicate that both the data‐driven and our physics‐based OLED lifetime models fit well the experimental data. The main drawback of the former method is that their efficacy is highly contingent on the quantity and quality of the operational dataset. Among all these methods, much more reliability information (time to failure) and the highest prediction accuracy can be achieved by FFNN.