Anomaly detection, an important task in data analysis, involves identifying observations or events that deviate in some way from the rest of the data. Machine learning techniques have shown success in automating this process by detecting hidden patterns and deviations in large-scale data. The potential of quantum computing for machine learning has been widely recognized, leading to extensive research efforts to develop suitable quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms. In particular, the search for QML algorithms for near-term NISQ devices is in full swing. However, NISQ devices pose additional challenges due to their limited qubit coherence times, low number of qubits, and high error rates. Kernel methods based on quantum kernel estimation have emerged as a promising approach to QML on NISQ devices, offering theoretical guarantees, versatility, and compatibility with NISQ constraints. Especially support vector machines (SVM) utilizing quantum kernel estimation have shown success in various supervised learning tasks. However, in the context of anomaly detection, semisupervised learning is of great relevance, and yet there is limited research published in this area. This paper introduces an approach to semisupervised anomaly detection based on the reconstruction loss of a support vector regression (SVR) with quantum kernel. This novel model is an alternative to the variational quantum and quantum kernel one-class classifiers, and is compared to a quantum autoencoder as quantum baseline and a SVR with radial-basis-function (RBF) kernel as well as a classical autoencoder as classical baselines. The models are benchmarked extensively on 10 real-world anomaly detection data sets and one toy data set and it is shown that our SVR model with quantum kernel performs better than the SVR with RBF kernel as well as all other models, achieving highest mean AUC over all data sets. In addition, our QSVR outperforms the Quantum autoencoder on 9 out of 11 data sets.
Anomaly detection, an important task in data analysis, involves identifying observations or events that deviate in some way from the rest of the data. Machine learning techniques have shown success in automating this process by detecting hidden patterns and deviations in large-scale data. The potential of quantum computing for machine learning has been widely recognized, leading to extensive research efforts to develop suitable quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms. In particular, the search for QML algorithms for near-term NISQ devices is in full swing. However, NISQ devices pose additional challenges due to their limited qubit coherence times, low number of qubits, and high error rates. Kernel methods based on quantum kernel estimation have emerged as a promising approach to QML on NISQ devices, offering theoretical guarantees, versatility, and compatibility with NISQ constraints. Especially support vector machines (SVM) utilizing quantum kernel estimation have shown success in various supervised learning tasks. However, in the context of anomaly detection, semisupervised learning is of great relevance, and yet there is limited research published in this area. This paper introduces an approach to semisupervised anomaly detection based on the reconstruction loss of a support vector regression (SVR) with quantum kernel. This novel model is an alternative to the variational quantum and quantum kernel one-class classifiers, and is compared to a quantum autoencoder as quantum baseline and a SVR with radial-basis-function (RBF) kernel as well as a classical autoencoder as classical baselines. The models are benchmarked extensively on 10 real-world anomaly detection data sets and one toy data set and it is shown that our SVR model with quantum kernel performs better than the SVR with RBF kernel as well as all other models, achieving highest mean AUC over all data sets. In addition, our QSVR outperforms the Quantum autoencoder on 9 out of 11 data sets.
Anomaly Detection (AD) is critical in data analysis, particularly within the domain of IT security. In this study, we explore the potential of Quantum Machine Learning for application to AD with special focus on the robustness to noise and adversarial attacks. We build upon previous work on Quantum Support Vector Regression (QSVR) for semisupervised AD by conducting a comprehensive benchmark on IBM quantum hardware using eleven datasets. Our results demonstrate that QSVR achieves strong classification performance and even outperforms the noiseless simulation on two of these datasets. Moreover, we investigate the influence of - in the NISQ-era inevitable - quantum noise on the performance of the QSVR. Our findings reveal that the model exhibits robustness to depolarizing, phase damping, phase flip, and bit flip noise, while amplitude damping and miscalibration noise prove to be more disruptive. Finally, we explore the domain of Quantum Adversarial Machine Learning by demonstrating that QSVR is highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, with neither quantum noise nor adversarial training improving the model's robustness against such attacks.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as an important area for Quantum applications, although useful QML applications would require many qubits. Therefore our paper is aimed at exploring the successful application of the Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) algorithm while balancing several practical and technical considerations under the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) assumption. For the quantum SVM under NISQ, we use quantum feature maps to translate data into quantum states and build the SVM kernel out of these quantum states, and further compare with classical SVM with radial basis function (RBF) kernels. As data sets are more complex or abstracted in some sense, classical SVM with classical kernels leads to less accuracy compared to QSVM, as classical SVM with typical classical kernels cannot easily separate different class data. Similarly, QSVM should be able to provide competitive performance over a broader range of data sets including ``simpler'' data cases in which smoother decision boundaries are required to avoid any model variance issues (i.e., overfitting). To bridge the gap between ``classical-looking'' decision boundaries and complex quantum decision boundaries, we propose to utilize general shallow unitary transformations to create feature maps with rotation factors to define a tunable quantum kernel, and added regularization to smooth the separating hyperplane model. We show in experiments that this allows QSVM to perform equally to SVM regardless of the complexity of the data sets and outperform in some commonly used reference data sets.
Quantum Support Vector Regression (QSVR) has emerged as one of the most promising quantum machine learning algorithms for nonlinear regression on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. However, despite numerous simulation-based studies, experimental evaluations on physical quantum hardware remain relatively scarce. This work presents a comparative analysis of three regression approaches: classical Support Vector Regression (SVR) with a Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel, classical SVR utilizing precomputed quantum kernels, and the native QSVR implementation available in the qiskit-machine-learning framework. Experiments were conducted on three benchmark regression datasets using three execution environments: a noiseless Qiskit Aer simulator, the IQM Adonis hardware-aware simulator, and the physical 5-qubit IQM Spark superconducting quantum computer (Odra 5) located at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Multiple quantum feature maps and circuit depths were investigated, while model hyperparameters were optimized using grid search. The obtained results demonstrate that QSVR can be successfully executed on contemporary superconducting quantum hardware and, for selected datasets, achieves prediction accuracy comparable to or exceeding that of a classical RBF-based SVR. The experiments further reveal the significant influence of quantum hardware noise, feature map selection, and circuit depth on regression quality. Moreover, the implementation based on precomputed quantum kernels generally exhibits greater robustness on physical hardware than the native QSVR implementation. The presented benchmark provides an experimental assessment of QSVR under realistic execution conditions and contributes to the ongoing evaluation of quantum machine learning algorithms on current NISQ-era quantum computers.
The quantum support vector machines (QSVMs) offer a paradigm change that may leverage quantum mechanical processes to outperform traditional support vector machines (SVMs) in high-dimensional and nonlinear classification tasks. These machines are located at the crossroads of supervised machine learning and quantum computing. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive technical analysis of QSVMs, with a particular emphasis on the use of variation quantum circuits for implicit feature space transformations and the development of these circuits within the context of quantum kernel estimation. Through the use of quantum state preparation and interference, we provide a comprehensive explanation of the possible fabrication of quantum kernels that are based on inner product evaluations in exponentially huge Hilbert spaces. When it comes to boosting model expressivity beyond classical limits, the importance that entanglement and quantum feature mapping play is specifically stressed. In addition to this, we investigate algorithmic implementations on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware, focusing on problems associated with quantum decoherence, gate fidelity, and loop depth optimization. Several fields, including quantum-enhanced drug discovery, anomaly detection in quantum sensor networks, fault classification in quantum error correction, and portfolio optimization, are now the focus of research that is being conducted in order to develop real-world applications. This chapter comes to a close with an analysis of the existing theoretical limits, resource needs, and future perspectives for the use of QSVMs in machine learning applications in order to achieve a quantum advantage. In order to facilitate the development of scalable quantum machine learning models that are founded on strong mathematical and computational notions, this synthesis is geared at academics and practitioners.
Abstract Quantum machine learning is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. In this work, we examine our quantum machine learning models, which are based on quantum support vector classification (QSVC) and quantum support vector regression (QSVR). We investigate these models using a quantum-circuit simulator, both with and without noise, as well as the IonQ Harmony quantum processor. For the QSVC tasks, we use a dataset containing fraudulent credit card transactions and image datasets (the MNIST and the Fashion-MNIST datasets); for the QSVR tasks, we use a financial dataset and a materials dataset. For the classification tasks, the performance of our QSVC models using 4 qubits of the trapped-ion quantum computer was comparable to that obtained from noiseless quantum-circuit simulations. The result is consistent with the analysis of our device-noise simulations with varying qubit-gate error rates. For the regression tasks, applying a low-rank approximation to the noisy quantum kernel, in combination with hyperparameter tuning in ε-SVR, improved the performance of the QSVR models on the near-term quantum device. Our results suggest that the quantum kernel, as described by our shallow quantum circuit, can be effectively used for both QSVC and QSVR tasks, indicating its resistance to noise and its adaptability to various datasets.
Quantum Support Vector Regression (QSVR) has become an exciting prospect of modeling the nonlinear relationship of high-dimensional data by using a kernel method. Nevertheless, the overall assessment of the whole QSVR pipeline, including preprocessing and dimensionality reduction, quantum embedding, shot-based kernel estimation, and noise-aware analysis, is not widespread. This paper introduces a working Python implementation of the QSVR framework that combines a principal component analysis (PCA)-to-qubit embedding, a 1024-shot quantum kernel implementation, and 1024-shot 1/2-SVR optimization on financial time-series and credit transaction regression problems. Classical features are normalized and minimized to around 20 major features that capture 95% of the variance in the data before being angle-based RY embedded using a depth-3 entangling circuit. Quantum kernels are built through state-overlap estimation on finite-shot constraints, and they are trained by cross-validated optimization. The robustness of the proposed framework is measured in both noise-free and simulator-generated noise conditions in case of controlled noise approximations. Experimentation indicates improved regression performance than that of an RBF-SVR baseline with the same preprocessing and validation conditions. The suggested workflow designates the concept of reproducibility, benchmarking control, and feasible noise-conscious evaluation, which offers a systematic reference structure to subsequent research within near-term quantum machine learning.