A method includes determining a plurality of molecular descriptors, each molecular descriptor of the plurality of molecular descriptors associated with at least one of an atomic scale property, a molecular scale property, and a compound-scale property. The method further includes selecting, by a selection operator and based on a minimization of an error, a subset of the plurality of molecular descriptors that affect a polymer surface energy, training a machine learning model to predict a polymer surface energy of a given polymer based on the subset of molecular descriptors and predicting, via the trained machine learning model, a surface energy of an input polymer.