Recognition of polymer configurations by unsupervised learning

Unsupervised learning as an important branch of machine learning is commonly adopted to discover patterns, with the purpose of conducting data clustering without being labeled in advance. In this study, we elucidate the striking ability of unsupervised learning techniques in exploring the phase transitions of polymer configurations. In order to extract the low-dimensional representation of polymer configurations, principal component analysis and diffusion map are applied to distinguish the coiled state and collapsed states and further detect the delicate distinction among collapsed states, respectively. These dimensionality reduction techniques not only identify the distinct states in the feature space, but also offer significant insights to understand the relation between salient features and order parameters in physics. In addition, a hybrid neural network scheme combining the supervised learning and unsupervised learning is utilized to precisely detect the critical point of phase transition between polymer configurations. Our study demonstrates a promising strategy based on the unsupervised learning, particularly in the exploration of phase transition in polymeric systems.