Machine learning of kinetic energy densities with target and feature smoothing: Better results with fewer training data

Machine learning (ML) of kinetic energy functionals (KEFs), in particular kinetic energy density (KED) functionals, is a promising way to construct KEFs for orbital-free density functional theory (DFT). Neural networks and kernel methods including Gaussian process regression (GPR) have been used to learn Kohn–Sham (KS) KED from density-based descriptors derived from KS DFT calculations. The descriptors are typically expressed as functions of different powers and derivatives of the electron density. This can generate large and extremely unevenly distributed datasets, which complicates effective application of ML techniques. Very uneven data distributions require many training datapoints, can cause overfitting, and can ultimately lower the quality of an ML KED model. We show that one can produce more accurate ML models from fewer data by working with smoothed density-dependent variables and KED. Smoothing palliates the issue of very uneven data distributions and associated difficulties of sampling while retaining enough spatial structure necessary for working within the paradigm of KEDF. We use GPR as a function of smoothed terms of the fourth order gradient expansion and KS effective potential and obtain accurate and stable (with respect to different random choices of training points) kinetic energy models for Al, Mg, and Si simultaneously from as few as 2000 samples (about 0.3% of the total KS DFT data). In particular, accuracies on the order of 1% in a measure of the quality of energy–volume dependence B′=EV0−ΔV−2EV0+E(V0+ΔV)ΔV/V02 (where V0 is the equilibrium volume and ΔV is a deviation from it) are obtained simultaneously for all three materials.