I tried hard to make it reproducible, so hopefully this paper can serve as an example on how reproducibility can be achieved. I think that being reproducible with only few commands to type in a terminal is quite an achievment. At least in my field, where I usually see code published along with paper, but with almost no documentation on how to rerun it.
This paper presents a fine example of high-throughput computational materials screening studies, mainly focusing on the carbon nanoclusters of different sizes. In the paper, a set of diverse empirical and machine-learned interatomic potentials, which are commonly used to simulate carbonaceous materials, is benchmarked against the higher-level density functional theory (DFT) data, using a range of diverse structural features as the comparison criteria. Trying to reproduce the data presented here (even if you only consider a subset of the interaction potentials) will help you devise an understanding as to how you could approach a high-throughput structure prediction problem. Even though we concentrate here on isolated/finite nanoclusters, AIRSS (and other similar approaches like USPEX, CALYPSO, GMIN, etc.,) can also be used to predict crystal structures of different class of materials with applications in energy storage, catalysis, hydrogen storage, and so on.
Systematically improvable machine learning potentials could have a significant impact on the range of properties that can be modelled, but the toolchain associated with using them presents a barrier to entry for new users. Attempting to reproduce some of our results will help us improve the accessibility of the approach.
Popular descriptors for machine learning potentials such as the Behler-Parinello atom centred symmetry functions (ACSF) or the Smooth Overlap of Interatomic Potentials (SOAP) are widely used but so far not much attention has been paid to optimising how many descriptor components need to be included to give good results.
Most of the material is available through Jupyter notebooks in GitHub, and it should be easy to reproduce with the help of Binder. With the notebooks, you could experiment with different parameters to the ones analyzed in the paper. It also contains a large dataset of physical parameters of galaxies analysed in this work. We expect this work to be easily reproducible in the steps described in the repository.
Because: - Two fellow PhDs working on different topics have been able to reproduce some figures by following the README instructions and I hope this extends to other people - I've tried to incorporate as many of the best practices as possible to make my code and data open and accessible - I've tried to make sure that my data is exactly reproducible with the specified random seed strategy - the paper suggests a method that should be useful to other researchers in my field, which is not useful unless my results are reproducible
The original data took quite a while to produce for a previous paper, but for this paper, all tables and figures should be exactly reproducible by simply running the jupyter notebook.
