Regression-clustering for Improved Accuracy and Training Cost with Molecular-Orbital-Based Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) in the representation of molecular-orbital-based (MOB) features has been shown to be an accurate and transferable approach to the prediction of post-Hartree-Fock correlation energies. Previous applications of MOB-ML employed Gaussian Process Regression (GPR), which provides good prediction accuracy with small training sets; however, the cost of GPR training scales cubically with the amount of data and becomes a computational bottleneck for large training sets. In the current work, we address this problem by introducing a clustering/regression/classification implementation of MOB-ML. In a first step, regression clustering (RC) is used to partition the training data to best fit an ensemble of linear regression (LR) models; in a second step, each cluster is regressed independently, using either LR or GPR; and in a third step, a random forest classifier (RFC) is trained for the prediction of cluster assignments based on MOB feature values. Upon inspection, RC is found to recapitulate che...