In this study, Cu-Cr composites were studied by nanoindentation. Arrays of indents were placed over large areas of the samples resulting in datasets consisting of several hundred measurements of Young's modulus and hardness at varying indentation depths. The unsupervised learning technique, Gaussian mixture model, was employed to analyze the data, which helped to determine the number of "mechanical phases" and the respective mechanical properties. Additionally, a cross-validation approach was introduced to infer whether the data quantity was adequate and to suggest the amount of data required for reliable predictions -- one of the often encountered but difficult to resolve issues in machine learning of materials science problems.

The chemical space for designing materials is practically infinite. This makes disruptive progress by traditional physics-based modeling alone challenging. Yet, training data for identifying composition–structure–property relations by artificial intelligence are sparse. We discuss opportunities to discover new chemically complex materials by hybrid methods where physics laws are combined with artificial intelligence. Machine learning models have been widely applied to boost the computational efficiency of searching vast chemical space of compositionally complex materials. This Perspective summarizes the recent developments and proposes future opportunities, such as the physics-informed machine learning models.