To unravel pairing mechanism of a superconductor from limited, indirect experimental data is always a difficult task. It is common but sometimes dubious to explain by a theoretical model with some tuning parameters. In this work, we propose that the machine learning might infer pairing mechanism from observables like superconducting gap functions. For superconductivity within the Migdal–Eliashberg theory, we perform supervised learning between superconducting gap functions and electron–boson spectral functions. For simple spectral functions, the neural network can easily capture the correspondence and predict perfectly. For complex spectral functions, an autoencoder is utilized to reduce the complexity of the spectral functions to be compatible to that of the gap functions. After this complexity-reduction process, relevant information of the spectral function is extracted and good performance restores. Our proposed method can extract relevant information from data and can be applied to general function-to-function mappings with asymmetric complexities either in physics or other fields.

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Topological phase classifications have been intensively studied via machine-learning techniques where different forms of the training data are proposed in order to maximize the information extracted from the systems of interests. Due to the complexity in quantum physics, advanced mathematical architecture should be considered in designing machines. In this work, we incorporate quaternion algebras into data analysis either in the frame of supervised and unsupervised learning to classify two-dimensional Chern insulators. For the unsupervised-learning aspect, we apply the principal component analysis (PCA) on the quaternion-transformed eigenstates to distinguish topological phases. For the supervised-learning aspect, we construct our machine by adding one quaternion convolutional layer on top of a conventional convolutional neural network. The machine takes quaternion-transformed configurations as inputs and successfully classify all distinct topological phases, even for those states that have different distributuions from those states seen by the
machine during the training process. Our work demonstrates the power of quaternion algebras on extracting crucial features from the targeted data and the advantages of quaternion-based neural networks than conventional ones in the tasks of topological phase classifications.