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.
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.
I guess it could be a cool learning experience. The paper is written with knitr, uses a seed, is part of the R package it describes, was openly written using version control (SVN, R-Forge) and is available in an open access journal (@up_jors).