What is the physics meaning of the features in Matminer, such as "mean column"?

Hello,

I have imported composition-based features from Matminer following the steps in example “predicts bulk modulus of materials”. What is the physics meaning of the features, such as “MagpieData mean Column” and “MagpieData mode MendeleevNumber”? I can’t find them in Matminer documents. Thanks.

Hey there,

It will be clear if you read the source code’s docstrings. Typically for each featurizer, there will be a text explanation of what features mean.

For the features you’re referring to, it refers to statistics taken over elemental attributes for a particular composition. So here, “Column” means the column (group) in the periodic table a particular element belongs to; “MagPieData” is the source of the data, which in this case is the MagPie descriptor set published by Ward et al.; “mean” is the statistic applied to “Column” over the entire composition being featurized.

Thanks,
Alex