A potential advantage of quantum machine learning stems from the ability of encoding classical data into high dimensional complex Hilbert space using quantum circuits. Recent studies exhibit that not all encoding methods are the same when representing classical data since certain parameterized circuit structures are more expressive than the others. In this study, we show the difference in encoding techniques can be visualized by investigating the topology of the data embedded in complex Hilbert space. The technique for visualization is a hybrid quantum based topological analysis which uses simple diagonalization of the boundary operators to compute the persistent Betti numbers and the persistent homology graph. To augment the computation of Betti numbers within a NISQ framework, we suggest a simple hybrid algorithm. Through an illuminating example of a synthetic data set and the methods of angle encoding, amplitude encoding, and IQP encoding, we reveal topological differences between the encoding methods, as well as differences with the original data. Consequently, our results suggest the encoding method needs to be considered carefully within different quantum machine learning models since it can strongly affect downstream analysis like clustering or classification.
A potential advantage of quantum machine learning stems from the ability of encoding classical data into high dimensional complex Hilbert space using quantum circuits. Recent studies exhibit that not all encoding methods are the same when representing classical data since certain parameterized circuit structures are more expressive than the others. In this study, we show the difference in encoding techniques can be visualized by investigating the topology of the data embedded in complex Hilbert space. The technique for visualization is a hybrid quantum based topological analysis which uses simple diagonalization of the boundary operators to compute the persistent Betti numbers and the persistent homology graph. To augment the computation of Betti numbers within a NISQ framework, we suggest a simple hybrid algorithm. Through an illuminating example of a synthetic data set and the methods of angle encoding, amplitude encoding, and IQP encoding, we reveal topological differences between the encoding methods, as well as differences with the original data. Consequently, our results suggest the encoding method needs to be considered carefully within different quantum machine learning models since it can strongly affect downstream analysis like clustering or classification.
Abstract Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a well-established field derived to give insight into the geometric structure of real-world data. However, many methods in TDA are computationally intensive. The method that computes the respective Betti number has been shown to obtain a speed-up from translating the algorithm into a quantum circuit. The quantum circuit to calculate a particular Betti number requires a significant number of gates and, without a small record of data, is currently unable to be implemented on a NISQ-era processor. Given this NISQ-era restriction, a hybrid-method is proposed that calculates the Euclidean distance of the encoded data and computes the desired Betti number. This method is applied to a toy data set with different encoding techniques. The empirical results show the noise within the data is intensified with each encoding method as there is a clear change in the geometric structure of the original data, exhibiting information loss.
Abstract: Quantum Topological Data Analysis (QTDA) is introduced as a hybrid classical–quantum methodology for accelerating persistent homology on complex manifolds while preserving topological interpretability. The approach encodes simplicial complexes into quantum states, applies boundary operators via unitary transforms, and estimates invariants with variational and linear‑algebraic quantum routines. An end‑to‑end pipeline is formalized that couples deep representation learning with quantum‑assisted homological primitives, yielding stable persistence diagrams aligned with structural robustness. Experiments on synthetic and semi‑synthetic filtrations quantify latency, scaling, and stability, showing empirical reductions in runtime growth under modest qubit budgets. The results indicate that QTDA enables time‑critical analytics such as anomaly detection and manifold clustering, while meeting explainability and governance requirements through auditable topological summaries. Keywords Quantum Topological Data Analysis, persistent homology, Betti numbers, simplicial complexes, variational quantum algorithms, manifold learning, interpretability, auditability
Persistence diagrams serve as a core tool in topological data analysis, playing a crucial role in pathological monitoring, drug discovery, and materials design. However, existing quantum topological algorithms, such as the LGZ algorithm, can only efficiently compute summary statistics like Betti numbers, failing to provide persistence diagram information that tracks the lifecycle of individual topological features, severely limiting their practical value. This paper proposes a novel quantum-classical hybrid algorithm that achieves, for the first time, the leap from "quantum computation of Betti numbers" to "quantum acquisition of practical persistence diagrams." The algorithm leverages the LGZ quantum algorithm as an efficient feature extractor, mining the harmonic form eigenvectors of the combinatorial Laplacian as well as Betti numbers, constructing specialized topological kernel functions to train a quantum support vector machine (QSVM), and learning the mapping from quantum topological features to persistence diagrams. The core contributions of this algorithm are: (1) elevating quantum topological computation from statistical summaries to pattern recognition, greatly expanding its application value; (2) obtaining more practical topological information in the form of persistence diagrams for real-world applications while maintaining the exponential speedup advantage of quantum computation; (3) proposing a novel hybrid paradigm of "classical precision guiding quantum efficiency." This method provides a feasible pathway for the practical implementation of quantum topological data analysis.
Extracting useful information from large data sets can be a daunting task. Topological methods for analysing data sets provide a powerful technique for extracting such information. Persistent homology is a sophisticated tool for identifying topological features and for determining how such features persist as the data is viewed at different scales. Here we present quantum machine learning algorithms for calculating Betti numbers--the numbers of connected components, holes and voids--in persistent homology, and for finding eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the combinatorial Laplacian. The algorithms provide an exponential speed-up over the best currently known classical algorithms for topological data analysis.
Topological data analysis (TDA) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting meaningful insights from complex data. TDA enhances the analysis of objects by embedding them into a simplicial complex and extracting useful global properties such as the Betti numbers, i.e. the number of multidimensional holes, which can be used to define kernel methods that are easily integrated with existing machine-learning algorithms. These kernel methods have found broad applications, as they rely on powerful mathematical frameworks which provide theoretical guarantees on their performance. However, the computation of higher-dimensional Betti numbers can be prohibitively expensive on classical hardware, while quantum algorithms can approximate them in polynomial time in the instance size. In this work, we propose a quantum approach to defining topological kernels, which is based on constructing Betti curves, i.e. topological fingerprint of filtrations with increasing order. We exhibit a working prototype of our approach implemented on a noiseless simulator and show its robustness by means of some empirical results suggesting that topological approaches may offer an advantage in quantum machine learning.
We introduce several new quantum algorithms for estimating homological invariants, specifically Betti numbers and persistent Betti numbers, of a simplicial complex given via a structured classical input. At the core of our algorithm lies the ability to efficiently construct the block-encoding of Laplacians (and persistent Laplacians) based on the classical description of the given complex. From such block-encodings, Betti numbers (and persistent Betti numbers) can be estimated. The complexity of our method is polylogarithmic in the number of simplices in both simplex-sparse and simplex-dense regimes, thus offering an advantage over existing works. Moreover, prior quantum algorithms based on spectral methods incur significant overhead due to their reliance on estimating the kernel of combinatorial Laplacians, particularly when the Betti number is small. We introduce a new approach for estimating Betti numbers based on homology tracking and homology property testing, which enables exponential quantum speedups over both classical and prior quantum approaches under sparsity and structure assumptions. We further initiate the study of homology triviality and equivalence testing as natural property testing problems in topological data analysis, and provide efficient quantum algorithms with time complexity nearly linear in the number of simplices when the rank of the boundary operator is large. In addition, we develop a cohomological approach based on block-encoded projections onto cocycle spaces, enabling rank-independent testing of homology equivalence. This yields the first quantum algorithms for constructing and manipulating r-cocycles in time polylogarithmic in the size of the complex. Together, these results establish a new direction in quantum topological data analysis and demonstrate that computing topological invariants can serve as a fertile ground for provable quantum advantage.