High-throughput screening of CO2 cycloaddition MOF catalyst with an explainable machine learning model

The high porosity and tunable chemical functionality of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) make it a promising catalyst design platform. High-throughput screening of catalytic performance is feasible since the large MOF structure database is available. In this study, we report a machine learning model for high-throughput screening of MOF catalysts for the CO₂ cycloaddition reaction. The descriptors for model training were judiciously chosen according to the reaction mechanism, which leads to high accuracy up to 97% for the 75% quantile of the training set as the classification criterion. The feature contribution was further evaluated with SHAP and PDP analysis to provide a certain physical understanding. 12,415 hypothetical MOF structures and 100 reported MOFs were evaluated under 100 °C and 1 bar within one day using the model, and 239 potentially efficient catalysts were discovered. Among them, MOF-76(Y) achieved the top performance experimentally among reported MOFs, in good agreement with the prediction.