# Bootstrap statistics¶

We have published a paper on systematically addressing uncertainty in atomistic machine learning, in which we focused on a basic bootstrap ensemble method:

Peterson, Christensen, and Khorshidi, “Addressing uncertainty in atomistic machine learning”, PCCP 19:10978-10985, 2017. DOI:10.1039/C7CP00375G

A helper module to create bootstrap calculators, which are capable of giving not just a mean model prediction, but uncertainty intervals, is described here. Note that you should use uncertainty intervals with caution, and, as we describe in the above paper, the “correct” interpretation of seeing large uncertainty bounds for a particular atomic configuration is that a new electronic structure calculation is required (at that configuration), and not that the true median will lie within those bounds.

## Training¶

The below script shows a simple example of creating a bootstrap ensemble of 10 calculators for a small sample training set. (But you probably want an ensemble size much larger than 10 for reasonable statistics!)

from amp.utilities import Logger
from amp.stats.bootstrap import BootStrap

def generate_data(count, filename='training.traj'):
"""Generates test or training data with a simple MD simulation."""
import os
from ase import Atoms, Atom, units
import ase.io
from ase.calculators.emt import EMT
from ase.lattice.surface import fcc110
from ase.md.velocitydistribution import MaxwellBoltzmannDistribution
from ase.md import VelocityVerlet
from ase.constraints import FixAtoms
if os.path.exists(filename):
return
traj = ase.io.Trajectory(filename, 'w')
atoms = fcc110('Pt', (2, 2, 2), vacuum=7.)
atoms.extend(Atoms([Atom('Cu', atoms[7].position + (0., 0., 2.5)),
Atom('Cu', atoms[7].position + (0., 0., 5.))]))
atoms.set_constraint(FixAtoms(indices=[0, 2]))
atoms.set_calculator(EMT())
atoms.get_potential_energy()
traj.write(atoms)
MaxwellBoltzmannDistribution(atoms, 300. * units.kB)
dyn = VelocityVerlet(atoms, dt=1. * units.fs)
for step in range(count - 1):
dyn.run(50)
traj.write(atoms)

generate_data(5, 'training.traj')

calc_text = """
from amp import Amp
from amp.descriptor.gaussian import Gaussian
from amp.model.neuralnetwork import NeuralNetwork
from amp.model import LossFunction

calc = Amp(descriptor=Gaussian(),
model=NeuralNetwork(),
dblabel='../amp-db',
calc.model.lossfunction = LossFunction(force_coefficient=0.,
convergence={'force_rmse': None})
"""

start_command = 'python run.py'

calc = BootStrap(log=Logger('bootstrap.log'))
calc.train(images='training.traj', n=10, calc_text=calc_text,
start_command=start_command, label='bootstrap')


Run the above script once and wait for it to finish (probably <1 minute). You will see lots of directories created with the ensemble calculators. Run the same script again, and it will clean up / archive these directories into a compressed (.tar.gz) file, and create a calculator parameters file called ‘bootstrap.ensemble’, which you can load with Bootstrap(load=’bootstrap.ensemble’), as described later.

First, some notes on the above. The individual calculators are created with the calc_text variable in the above script; you can modify things like neural network size or convergence criteria in this text block.

In the above, the optional start_command is the command to start the job, which defaults to “python run.py”. Here, it runs each calculator’s training sequentially; that is, after one finishes it starts the next. If your machine has >10 cores, or you don’t mind the training processes all competing for resources, you can have them all run in parallel by placing an ampersand (in *nix systems) at the end of this line, that is “python run.py &”.

Most likely, you want to run this on a high-performance computing cluster that uses a queuing system. In this case, start_command is your queuing command, for our SLURM system this is just

start_command = 'sbatch run.py'


If you need to supply headerlines to your queuing system, you can do them with something like the below.

headerlines = """#SBATCH --time=00:30:00
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --partition=batch
"""

...

calc.train(images='training.traj', n=10, train_line=train_line,
start_command=start_command, label='bootstrap')


In a similar way, you can also supply a custom train_line if necessary; see the module’s autodocumentation for details.

The bootstrap ensemble can be loaded via the calculator’s load keyword. The below script shows an example of loading the calculator, and using it to predict the energies and the spread of the ensemble for the training images.

import ase.io
from amp.stats.bootstrap import BootStrap

traj = ase.io.Trajectory('training.traj')

for image in traj:
energies = calc.get_potential_energy(image,
output=(0.05, 0.5, 0.95))
print(energies)
energy = image.get_potential_energy()
print(energy)


Note that the call to calc.get_potential_energy returns three energy predictions, at the 5th, 50th (median), and 95th percentile, as specified with the tuple (0.05, 0.5, 0.95). When you run this, you should see that the median prediction matches the true energy (from image.get_potential_energy) quite well, while the spread in the data is due to the sparsity of data; as described in our paper above, this ensemble technique punishes regions of the potential energy surface with infrequent data.