Materials discovery is crucial for making scienti c advances in many domains. Collections of data from experiments and rstprinciple computations have spurred interest in applying machine learning methods to create predictive models capable of mapping from composition and crystal structures to materials properties. Generally, these are regression problems with the input being a 1D vector composed of numerical a ributes representing the material composition and/or crystal structure. While neural networks consisting of fully connected layers have been applied to such problems, their performance o en su ers from the vanishing gradient problem when network depth is increased. Hence, predictive modeling for such tasks has been mainly limited to traditional machine learning techniques such as Random Forest. In this paper, we study and propose design principles for building deep regression networks composed of fully connected layers with numerical vectors as input. We introduce a novel deep regression network with individual residual learning, IRNet, that places shortcut connections a er each layer so that each layer learns the residual mapping between its output and input. We use the problem of learning properties of inorganic materials from numerical a ributes derived from material composition and/or crystal structure to compare IRNet's performance against that of other machine learning techniques. Using multiple datasets from the Open antum Materials Database (OQMD) and Materials Project for training and evaluation, we show that IRNet provides signi cantly be er prediction performance than the stateof-the-art machine learning approaches currently used by domain ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, or contractor of the national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only. Permission to make digital or hard copies for personal or classroom use is granted. Copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. To copy otherwise, distribute, republish, or post, requires prior speci c permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.