Spectral graph theory is a branch of mathematics that studies the relationships between the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of Laplacian and adjacency matrices and their associated graphs. The Variational Quantum Eigen- solver (VQE) algorithm was proposed as a hybrid quantum/classical algorithm that is used to quickly determine the ground state of a Hamiltonian, and more generally, the lowest eigenvalue of a matrix M ∈ Rnxn. There are many interesting problems associated with the spectral decompositions of associated matrices, such as partitioning, embedding, and the determination of other properties. In this paper, we will expand upon the VQE algorithm to analyze the spectra of directed and undirected graphs. We evaluate runtime and accuracy comparisons (empirically and theoretically) between different choices of ansatz parameters, graph sizes, graph densities, and matrix types, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on Rigetti's QCS platform on graphs of up to 64 vertices, finding eigenvalues of adjacency and Laplacian matrices. We finally make direct comparisons to classical performance with the Quantum Virtual Machine (QVM) in the appendix, observing a superpolynomial runtime improvement of our algorithm when run using a quantum computer.*
With the development of quantum algorithms, high-cost computations are being scrutinized in the hope of a quantum advantage. While graphs offer a convenient framework for multiple real-world problems, their analytics still comes with high computation and space. By mapping the graph data into a low dimensional space, in which graph structural information is preserved, the eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix constitute a powerful node embedding, called Laplacian Eigenmaps. Computing these embeddings is on its own an expensive task knowing that using specific sparse methods, the eigendecomposition of a Laplacian matrix has a cost of O(
rn2),
r being the ratio of nonzero elements. We propose a method to compute a Laplacian Eigenmap using a quantum variational circuit. The idea of our algorithm is to reach the eigenstates of the laplacian matrix, which can be considered as a hamiltonian operator, by adapting the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm. By estimating the
d first eigenvectors of the Laplacian at the same time, our algorithm directly generates a
d dimension quantum embedding of the graph. We demonstrate that it is possible to use the embedding for graph machine learning tasks by implementing a quantum classifier on the top of it. The overall circuit consists in a full quantum node classification algorithm. Tests on 32 nodes graph with a quantum simulator shows that we can achieve similar performances as the classical laplacian eigenmap algorithm. Although mathematical properties of this approximate approach are not fully understood, this algorithm opens perspectives for graph pre-processing using noisy quantum computers.
We introduce a novel hybrid quantum–analog algorithm to perform a graph clustering that exploits connections between the evolution of dynamical systems on graphs and the underlying graph spectra. This approach constitutes a new class of algorithms that combine emerging quantum and analog platforms to accelerate computations. Our hybrid algorithm is equivalent to spectral clustering and significantly reduces the computational complexity from 𝒪(N3) to 𝒪(N), where N is the number of nodes in the graph. We achieve this speedup by circumventing the need for explicit eigendecomposition of the normalized graph Laplacian matrix, which dominates the classical complexity, and instead leveraging quantum evolution of the Schrödinger equation followed by efficient analog computation for the dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) step. Specifically, while classical spectral clustering requires 𝒪(N3) operations to perform eigendecomposition, our method exploits the natural quantum evolution of states according to the graph Laplacian Hamiltonian in linear time, combined with the linear scaling for DMD that leverages efficient matrix–vector multiplications on analog hardware. We prove and demonstrate that this hybrid approach can extract the eigenvalues and scaled eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian by evolving Schrödinger dynamics on quantum computers followed by DMD computations on analog devices, providing a significant computational advantage for large-scale graph clustering problems. Our demonstrations can be reproduced using our code that has been released at on github.
Key properties of physical systems can be described by the eigenvalues of matrices that represent the system. Computational algorithms that determine the eigenvalues of these matrices exist, but they generally suffer from a loss of performance as the matrix grows in size. This process can be expanded to quantum computation to find the eigenvalues with better performance than the classical algorithms. One application of such an eigenvalue solver is to determine energy levels of a molecule given a matrix representation of its Hamiltonian using the variational principle. Using a variational quantum eigensolver, we determine the ground state energies of different molecules. We focus on the choice of optimization strategy for a Qiskit simulator on low-end hardware. The benefits of several different optimizers were weighed in terms of accuracy in comparison to an analytic classical solution as well as code efficiency.
Spectral clustering is a powerful unsupervised machine learning algorithm for clustering data with nonconvex or nested structures [A. Y. Ng, M. I. Jordan, and Y. Weiss, On spectral clustering: Analysis and an algorithm, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14: Proceedings of the 2001 Conference (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 849--856]. With roots in graph theory, it uses the spectral properties of the Laplacian matrix to project the data in a low-dimensional space where clustering is more efficient. Despite its success in clustering tasks, spectral clustering suffers in practice from a fast-growing running time of
O(n3), where
n is the number of points in the data set. In this work we propose an end-to-end quantum algorithm performing spectral clustering, extending a number of works in quantum machine learning. The quantum algorithm is composed of two parts: the first is the efficient creation of the quantum state corresponding to the projected Laplacian matrix, and the second consists of applying the existing quantum analog of the
k-means algorithm [I. Kerenidis, J. Landman, A. Luongo, and A. Prakash,
q-means: A quantum algorithm for unsupervised machine learning, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference (Curran Associates, Red Hook, NY, 2020), pp. 4136--4146]. Both steps depend polynomially on the number of clusters, as well as precision and data parameters arising from quantum procedures, and polylogarithmically on the dimension of the input vectors. Our numerical simulations show an asymptotic linear growth with
n when all terms are taken into account, significantly better than the classical cubic growth. This work opens the path to other graph-based quantum machine learning algorithms, as it provides routines for efficient computation and quantum access to the incidence, adjacency, and projected Laplacian matrices of a graph.
Abstract Extracting eigenvalues and eigenvectors of exponentially large matrices will be an important application of near-term quantum computers. The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) treats the case when the matrix is a Hamiltonian. Here, we address the case when the matrix is a density matrix ρ . We introduce the variational quantum state eigensolver (VQSE), which is analogous to VQE in that it variationally learns the largest eigenvalues of ρ as well as a gate sequence V that prepares the corresponding eigenvectors. VQSE exploits the connection between diagonalization and majorization to define a cost function
C=Tr(ρ~H) C = Tr ( ρ ̃ H ) where H is a non-degenerate Hamiltonian. Due to Schur-concavity, C is minimized when
ρ~=VρV† ρ ̃ = V ρ V † is diagonal in the eigenbasis of H . VQSE only requires a single copy of ρ (only n qubits) per iteration of the VQSE algorithm, making it amenable for near-term implementation. We heuristically demonstrate two applications of VQSE: (1) Principal component analysis, and (2) Error mitigation.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for finding the minimum eigenvalue of a Hamiltonian that involves the optimization of a parameterized quantum circuit. Since the resulting optimization problem is in general nonconvex, the method can converge to suboptimal parameter values that do not yield the minimum eigenvalue. In this work, we address this shortcoming by adopting the concept of variational adiabatic quantum computing (VAQC) as a procedure to improve VQE. In VAQC, the ground state of a continuously parameterized Hamiltonian is approximated via a parameterized quantum circuit. We discuss some basic theory of VAQC to motivate the development of a hybrid quantum-classical homotopy continuation method. The proposed method has parallels with a predictor-corrector method for numerical integration of differential equations. While there are theoretical limitations to the procedure, we see in practice that VAQC can successfully find good initial circuit parameters to initialize VQE. We demonstrate this with two examples from quantum chemistry. Through these examples, we provide empirical evidence that VAQC, combined with other techniques (an adaptive termination criteria for the classical optimizer and a variance-based resampling method for the expectation evaluation), can provide more accurate solutions than “plain” VQE, for the same amount of effort.