To witness quantum advantages in practical settings, substantial efforts are required not only at the hardware level but also on theoretical research to reduce the computational cost of a given protocol. Quantum computation has the potential to significantly enhance existing classical machine learning methods, and several quantum algorithms for binary classification based on the kernel method have been proposed. These algorithms rely on estimating an expectation value, which in turn requires an expensive quantum data encoding procedure to be repeated many times. In this work, we calculate explicitly the number of repetition necessary for acquiring a fixed success probability and show that the Hadamard-test and the swap-test circuits achieve the optimal variance in terms of the quantum circuit parameters. The variance, and hence the number of repetition, can be further reduced only via optimization over data-related parameters. We also show that the kernel-based binary classification can be performed with a single-qubit measurement regardless of the number and the dimension of the data. Finally, we show that for a number of relevant noise models the classification can be performed reliably without quantum error correction. Our findings are useful for designing quantum classification experiments under limited resources, which is the common challenge in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era.
To witness quantum advantages in practical settings, substantial efforts are required not only at the hardware level but also on theoretical research to reduce the computational cost of a given protocol. Quantum computation has the potential to significantly enhance existing classical machine learning methods, and several quantum algorithms for binary classification based on the kernel method have been proposed. These algorithms rely on estimating an expectation value, which in turn requires an expensive quantum data encoding procedure to be repeated many times. In this work, we calculate explicitly the number of repetition necessary for acquiring a fixed success probability and show that the Hadamard-test and the swap-test circuits achieve the optimal variance in terms of the quantum circuit parameters. The variance, and hence the number of repetition, can be further reduced only via optimization over data-related parameters. We also show that the kernel-based binary classification can be performed with a single-qubit measurement regardless of the number and the dimension of the data. Finally, we show that for a number of relevant noise models the classification can be performed reliably without quantum error correction. Our findings are useful for designing quantum classification experiments under limited resources, which is the common challenge in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era.
Kernel method is widely used in machine learning. At present, the connection between kernel methods and quantum computing has been gradually established, which provides a new algorithm idea for the field of quantum machine learning. Research shows that the construction of minimized quantum circuits can be reliably performed on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. This paper proposes a compact quantum classifier based on kernel method. By introducing the compact amplitude encoding, the data label of the phase corresponding to the quantum state is encoded. Compared with the proposed classifier based on quantum kernel method, it can reduce 2 quantum registers, further reduce the circuit depth, and thus reduce the algorithm complexity. The double qubit measurement is simplified to single qubit measurement. In addition, this model achieves the optimal variance in quantum circuit parameters, which can effectively save computational resources. Experimental simulation shows that the expected value measurement in the proposed classifier model is closer to the theoretical value, and the classification accuracy is more accurate. At the same time, the system model has low entanglement, which can effectively reduce the cost of the whole preparation.
Abstract Quantum computing opens exciting opportunities for kernel-based machine learning methods, which have broad applications in data analysis. Recent works show that quantum computers can efficiently construct a model of a classifier by engineering the quantum interference effect to carry out the kernel evaluation in parallel. For practical applications of these quantum machine learning methods, an important issue is to minimize the size of quantum circuits. We present the simplest quantum circuit for constructing a kernel-based binary classifier. This is achieved by generalizing the interference circuit to encode data labels in the relative phases of the quantum state and by introducing compact amplitude encoding, which encodes two training data vectors into one quantum register. When compared to the simplest known quantum binary classifier, the number of qubits is reduced by two and the number of steps is reduced linearly with respect to the number of training data. The two-qubit measurement with post-selection required in the previous method is simplified to single-qubit measurement. Furthermore, the final quantum state has a smaller amount of entanglement than that of the previous method, which advocates the cost-effectiveness of our method. Our design also provides a straightforward way to handle an imbalanced data set, which is often encountered in many machine learning problems.
Abstract Kernel methods have a wide spectrum of applications in machine learning. Recently, a link between quantum computing and kernel theory has been formally established, opening up opportunities for quantum techniques to enhance various existing machine-learning methods. We present a distance-based quantum classifier whose kernel is based on the quantum state fidelity between training and test data. The quantum kernel can be tailored systematically with a quantum circuit to raise the kernel to an arbitrary power and to assign arbitrary weights to each training data. Given a specific input state, our protocol calculates the weighted power sum of fidelities of quantum data in quantum parallel via a swap-test circuit followed by two single-qubit measurements, requiring only a constant number of repetitions regardless of the number of data. We also show that our classifier is equivalent to measuring the expectation value of a Helstrom operator, from which the well-known optimal quantum state discrimination can be derived. We demonstrate the performance of our classifier via classical simulations with a realistic noise model and proof-of-principle experiments using the IBM quantum cloud platform.
In the current era, known as Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ), encoding large amounts of data in the quantum devices is challenging and the impact of noise significantly affects the quality of the obtained results. A viable approach for the execution of quantum classification algorithms is the introduction of a well-known machine learning paradigm, namely, the ensemble methods. Indeed, the ensembles combine multiple internal classifiers, which are characterized by compact sizes due to the smaller data subsets used for training, to achieve more accurate and robust prediction performance. In this way, it is possible to reduce the qubit requirements with respect to a single larger classifier while achieving comparable or improved performance. In this work, we present an implementation and an extensive empirical evaluation of ensembles of quantum instance-based classifiers for binary classification, with the purpose of providing insights into their effectiveness, limitations, and potential for enhancing the performance of basic quantum models. In particular, three classical ensemble methods and three quantum instance-based classifiers have been taken into account here. Hence, the scheme that has been implemented (in Python) has a hybrid nature. The results (obtained on real-world datasets) have shown an accuracy advantage for the ensemble techniques with respect to the single quantum classifiers, and also an improvement in robustness. In fact, ensembles have proven effective not only in mitigating unsuitable data normalizations but also in reducing the impact of noise on quantum classifiers, enhancing their stability.
Quantum processors may enhance machine learning by mapping high-dimensional data onto quantum systems for processing. Conventional feature maps, for encoding data onto a quantum circuit are currently impractical, as the number of entangling gates scales quadratically with the dimension of the dataset and the number of qubits. In this work, we introduce a quantum feature map designed to handle high-dimensional data with a significantly reduced number of qubits and entangling operations. Our approach preserves essential data characteristics while promoting computational efficiency, as evidenced by extensive experiments on benchmark datasets that demonstrate a marked improvement in both accuracy and resource utilization when using our feature map as a kernel for characterization, as compared to state-of-the-art quantum feature maps. Our noisy simulation results, combined with lower resource requirements, highlight our map's ability to function within the constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Through numerical simulations and small-scale implementation on a superconducting circuit quantum computing platform, we demonstrate that our scheme performs on par or better than a set of classical algorithms for classification. While quantum kernels are typically stymied by exponential concentration, our approach is affected with a slower rate with respect to both the number of qubits and features, which allows practical applications to remain within reach. Our findings herald a promising avenue for the practical implementation of quantum machine learning algorithms on near future quantum computing platforms.
Abstract Quantum computers promise to enhance machine learning for practical applications. Quantum machine learning for real-world data has to handle extensive amounts of high-dimensional data. However, conventional methods for measuring quantum kernels are impractical for large datasets as they scale with the square of the dataset size. Here, we measure quantum kernels using randomized measurements. The quantum computation time scales linearly with dataset size and quadratic for classical post-processing. While our method scales in general exponentially in qubit number, we gain a substantial speed-up when running on intermediate-sized quantum computers. Further, we efficiently encode high-dimensional data into quantum computers with the number of features scaling linearly with the circuit depth. The encoding is characterized by the quantum Fisher information metric and is related to the radial basis function kernel. Our approach is robust to noise via a cost-free error mitigation scheme. We demonstrate the advantages of our methods for noisy quantum computers by classifying images with the IBM quantum computer. To achieve further speedups we distribute the quantum computational tasks between different quantum computers. Our method enables benchmarking of quantum machine learning algorithms with large datasets on currently available quantum computers.