  The use of machine learning methods for accelerating the design of
crystalline materials usually requires manually constructed feature vectors or
complex transformation of atom coordinates to input the crystal structure,
which either constrains the model to certain crystal types or makes it
difficult to provide chemical insights. Here, we develop a crystal graph
convolutional neural networks framework to directly learn material properties
from the connection of atoms in the crystal, providing a universal and
interpretable representation of crystalline materials. Our method provides a
highly accurate prediction of density functional theory calculated properties
for eight different properties of crystals with various structure types and
compositions after being trained with $10^4$ data points. Further, our
framework is interpretable because one can extract the contributions from local
chemical environments to global properties. Using an example of perovskites, we
show how this information can be utilized to discover empirical rules for
materials design.

Materials Science