Deductive Machine Learning Challenges and Opportunities in Chemical Applications

Contemporary machine learning algorithms have largely succeeded in automating the development of mathematical models from data. Although this is a striking accomplishment, it leaves unaddressed the multitude of scenarios, especially across the chemical sciences and engineering, where deductive, rather than inductive, reasoning is required and still depends on manual intervention by an expert. This review describes the characteristics of deductive reasoning that are helpful for understanding the role played by expert intervention in problem-solving and explains why such interventions are often relatively resistant to disruption by typical machine learning strategies. The article then discusses the factors that contribute to creating a deductive bottleneck, how deductive bottlenecks are currently addressed in several application areas, and how machine learning models capable of deduction can be designed. The review concludes with a tutorial case study that illustrates the challenges of deduction problems and a notebook for readers to experiment with on their own.