High-throughput virtual materials and drug discovery based on density functional theory has achieved tremendous success in recent decades, but its power on organic semiconducting molecules suffered catastrophically from the self-interaction error until the optimally tuned range-separated hybrid (OT-RSH) exchange-correlation functionals were developed. The accurate but expensive �first-principles OT-RSH transitions from a short-range (semi-)local functional to a long-range Hartree-Fock exchange at a distance characterized by the inverse of a molecule-specific, non-empirically-determined range-separation parameter (ω). In the present study, we proposed a promising stacked ensemble machine learning (SEML) model that provides an accelerated alternative of OT-RSH based on system-dependent structural and electronic configurations. We trained ML-ωPBE, the first functional in our series, using a database of 1,970 organic semiconducting molecules with sufficient structural diversity, and assessed its accuracy and efficiency using another 1,956 molecules. Compared with the �first-principles OT-ωPBE, our ML-ωPBE reached a mean absolute error of 0:00504a_0^{-1} for the optimal value of ω, reduced the computational cost for the test set by 2.66 orders of magnitude, and achieved comparable predictive powers in various optical properties.
Carbon Fluoride, CFx: Structural Diversity as Predicted by First Principles
