In this work, we aim to solve a practical use-case of unsupervised clustering which has applications in predictive maintenance in the energy operations sector using quantum computers. Using only cloud access to quantum computers, we complete a thorough performance analysis of what some current quantum computing systems are capable of for practical applications involving non-trivial mid-to-high dimensional datasets. We first benchmark how well distance estimation can be performed using two different metrics based on the swap-test, using angle and amplitude data embedding. Next, for the clustering performance analysis, we generate sets of synthetic data with varying cluster variance and compare simulation to physical hardware results using the two metrics. From the results of this performance analysis, we propose a general, competitive, and parallelized version of quantum$k$-means clustering to avoid some pitfalls discovered due to noisy hardware and apply the approach to a real energy grid clustering scenario. Using real-world German electricity grid data, we show that the new approach improves the balanced accuracy of the standard quantum$k$-means clustering by 67.8 % with respect to the labeling of the classical algorithm.
In this work, we aim to solve a practical use-case of unsupervised clustering which has applications in predictive maintenance in the energy operations sector using quantum computers. Using only cloud access to quantum computers, we complete a thorough performance analysis of what some current quantum computing systems are capable of for practical applications involving non-trivial mid-to-high dimensional datasets. We first benchmark how well distance estimation can be performed using two different metrics based on the swap-test, using angle and amplitude data embedding. Next, for the clustering performance analysis, we generate sets of synthetic data with varying cluster variance and compare simulation to physical hardware results using the two metrics. From the results of this performance analysis, we propose a general, competitive, and parallelized version of quantumk-means clustering to avoid some pitfalls discovered due to noisy hardware and apply the approach to a real energy grid clustering scenario. Using real-world German electricity grid data, we show that the new approach improves the balanced accuracy of the standard quantumk-means clustering by 67.8 % with respect to the labeling of the classical algorithm.
Quantum machine learning promises computational advantages for certain tasks, yet rigorous empirical evaluation of quantum clustering algorithms against classical baselines remains limited. This paper presents a comprehensive implementation and comparative analysis of two quantum K-means clustering algorithms—SWAP Test-based and Quantum Fidelity-based—against classical K-means on benchmark datasets. Both quantum approaches employ amplitude encoding to map classical data into quantum state amplitudes and use quantum-native distance metrics derived from inner products in Hilbert space. All three methods are evaluated on the ENB2012 energy efficiency dataset (768 samples, 8 features) and a synthetically expanded high-dimensional dataset (4,998 samples, 16 features), measuring silhouette score, inertia, and wall-clock execution time across cluster counts k ∈ {2, . . . , 7}. The experiments, conducted on Qiskit’s AerSimulator and Statevector backends, show that classical K-means achieves substantially higher silhouette scores (0.391 vs. 0.031 on the original dataset) and orders-of-magnitude faster execution. A rigorous analysis attributes these results to three factors: (i) the information loss inherent in amplitude encoding normalization, (ii) the geometric mismatch between Euclidean and Hilbert-space distance metrics, and (iii) the absence of quantum parallelism in classical simulation. The implications for quantum advantage in unsupervised learning are discussed and concrete requirements for near-term quantum hardware to achieve competitive clustering performance are outlined.
Every day, humans generate approximately 2.5 billion gigabytes of new data. While this data is crucial in applications such as drug development and cybersecurity, it is mostly unstructured and unlabeled which makes it difficult to process effectively. Businesses and governments alike solve this problem by using machine learning algorithms to characterize the data and make decisions with it. However, conventional machine learning processes consume excessive computational resources and time: one of the most prominent, K-means clustering, has an approximate time complexity of O(n^2), where n is the input data size. This quadratic time complexity causes scalability problems with large datasets. In this project, I have created an improved, more scalable clustering algorithm by leveraging quantum computation. The approach (new Q-means) involves an Angle Embedding Feature Map, an d-dimensional SWAP Test, and a dynamic, threshold distance-based termination criteria. After implementing this algorithm using the IBM Qiskit SDK, the new Q-means algorithm was run several times on different dimensional datasets. On an average, the new Q-means performed 18% better than the K-means algorithm based on the Adjusted Rand Index. In terms of the simulation execution time, the new Q-means was about six times faster than the existing Q-means due to a multi-threaded implementation and faster convergence. The time complexity of the new Q-means without a Quantum Random Access Memory (QRAM) is O(n^2). While the existing Q-means algorithm, which utilizes QRAM, has a time complexity of O(n(log n)^p), the time complexity of the new Q-means with QRAM is significantly better—O(n).
Classical machine learning algorithms are increasingly challenged by the growing complexity of datasets, motivating the exploration of quantum computing as a potential solution. However, current literature lacks comprehensive empirical analyses directly benchmarking classical algorithms against quantum-assisted counterparts for small but high-dimensional standardized datasets. This research aims to address this gap by comparing the performance of the k-means clustering algorithm on classical and hybrid quantum-classical computing platforms. Using a small dataset, we assess computational speed, clustering accuracy, and scalability. Our findings reveal that while hybrid quantum implementations offer theoretical benefits, in practice they incur significantly higher computational overhead and reduced clustering accuracy due to current technological constraints. These insights highlight the critical need for improved quantum hardware and algorithms, guiding future research directions in quantum-enhanced machine learning.
Recently, the volume of the generated data has increased significantly, leading to the need for computational techniques capable of handling such data efficiently. As a result, many quantum algorithms have been developed, and the domain of quantum machine learning (QML) has become more extensive. Traditional k-means algorithms for quantum computers usually make use of deep or shallow quantum circuits, resulting in sub-optimal clustering results. In our work, we introduce two types of quantum-inspired k-means algorithm: (1) the quantum subtraction operation and (2) the rotational-difference dissimilarity measure. Our second framework measures the dissimilarity using a quantum rotation-based dissimilarity circuit, which encodes the relative difference of the states. We employ a Hadamard-test-based circuit design, as well as an alternative technique that is not used in other quantum dissimilarities like the swap test. The introduced algorithms are evaluated on six different datasets—Iris, Wine, Breast Cancer Wisconsin, Blobs, Moons, and the noisier Iris dataset. Evaluation involves clustering validity metrics, as well as the classic classification performance metrics. The findings show that the rotational-based dissimilarity metric allows us to obtain clustering results comparable with the results obtained by the classical counterpart, thus showing the feasibility of the introduced distance calculation technique.
Quantum computing is one of the most promising solutions for solving optimization problems in the healthcare world. Quantum computing development aims to light up the execution of a vast and complex set of algorithmic instructions. For its implementation, the machine learning models are continuously evolving. Hence, the new challenge is to improve the existing complex and critical machine learning training models. Therefore, the healthcare sector is shifting from a classical to a quantum domain to sustain patient-oriented attention to healthcare patrons. This paper presents a hybrid classical-quantum approach for training the unsupervised data models. In order to achieve good performance and optimization of the machine learning algorithms, a quantum k-means (QK-means) clustering problem was deployed on the IBM quantum simulators, i.e.,the IBM QASM simulator. In the first place, the approach was theoretically studied and then implemented to analyze the experimental results. The approach was further tested using small synthetics and cardiovascular datasets on a qsam simulator to obtain the clustering solution. The future direction connecting the dots is the incremental k-means algorithm with the quantum platform, which would open hitherto unimaginable technological doors.
Abstract Quantum state clustering provides a powerful tool for quantum information processing. This paper focuses on the classification of single-qubit pure and mixed states via clustering algorithms, and discovers that the classical K -means algorithm has two limitations in clustering quantum states: the Euclidean distance cannot accurately reflect the similarity between quantum states, and the centroid update based on the arithmetic mean frequently fails to yield valid quantum states. To address these issues, we propose two distance metrics for quantum states: the dynamic distance and the Bloch distance, and adopt the K -medoids method to update the centroid, ensuring that the cluster center always remains a valid quantum state, thereby designing a quantum-data-adaptive clustering algorithm. Experimental results show that the dynamic distance achieves a clustering accuracy as high as 91.4 % , but at the cost of higher computational complexity. In contrast, the Bloch distance significantly reduces computational complexity while maintaining clustering performance comparable to that of the dynamic distance, achieving a clustering accuracy of 87.4 % . This paper provides a practical method for achieving efficient and reliable clustering of single-qubit quantum states.