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.
Spectral graph partitioning is a well known technique to estimate clusters in undirected graphs. Recent approaches explored efficient spectral algorithms for directed and mixed graphs utilizing various matrix representations. Despite its success in clustering tasks, classical spectral algorithms suffer from a cubic growth in runtime. In this paper, we propose a quantum spectral clustering algorithm for discovering clusters and properties of mixed graphs. Our experimental results based on numerical simulations demonstrate that our quantum spectral clustering outperforms classical spectral clustering techniques. Specifically, our approach leads to a linear growth in complexity, while state-of-the-art classical counterpart leads to cubic growth. In a case study, we apply our proposed algorithm to preform unsupervised machine learning using both real and simulated quantum computers. This work opens an avenue for efficient implementation of machine learning algorithms on directed as well as mixed graphs by making use of the inherent potential quantum speedup.
Spectral clustering is one of the most robust methods of an unsupervised machine learning field. Compared with the well-known k-means, spectral clustering uses the spectral properties of the Laplacian matrix to project data to a low-dimensional clustering with higher efficiency. However, for a sparse network with a substantial degree of heterogeneity, standard spectral clustering often overfits noise in the periphery of a sparse and stochastic graph. In our work, we combined the quantum version of the k-means algorithm with regularized spectral clustering and proposed a new quantum machine learning algorithm. It is more like a combination of classical and quantum algorithms. Compared with the established quantum k-means algorithm, our method has obvious computational advantages in non-convex or nested structures. At this stage, the research of quantum algorithms mainly stays in the simulation of classical computers. Our method does not need to expend a lot of effort to preprocess the data at the initial quantum state stage. Under the assumption of quantum data encoding, we theoretically demonstrate the feasibility of the quantum regularized spectral clustering algorithm. Then combine Q-means algorithm complexity advantages to complete the clustering task. This work aims to pave the path and help realize quantum spectral clustering algorithms on real quantum computers in the future and help create other versions of quantum machine learning algorithms. We provide simulations and data examples to illustrate these results.