The Helstrom measurement (HM) is known to be the optimal strategy for distinguishing non-orthogonal quantum states with minimum error. Previously, a binary classifier based on classical simulation of the HM has been proposed. It was observed that using multiple copies of the sample data reduced the classification error. Nevertheless, the exponential growth in simulation runtime hindered a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between the number of copies and classification performance. We present an efficient simulation method for an arbitrary number of copies by utilizing the relationship between HM and state fidelity. Our method reveals that the classification performance does not improve monotonically with the number of data copies. Instead, it needs to be treated as a hyperparameter subject to optimization, achievable only through the method proposed in this work. We present a Quantum-Inspired Machine Learning binary classifier with excellent performance, providing such empirical evidence by benchmarking on eight datasets and comparing it with 13 hyperparameter optimized standard classifiers.
The Helstrom measurement (HM) is known to be the optimal strategy for distinguishing non-orthogonal quantum states with minimum error. Previously, a binary classifier based on classical simulation of the HM has been proposed. It was observed that using multiple copies of the sample data reduced the classification error. Nevertheless, the exponential growth in simulation runtime hindered a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between the number of copies and classification performance. We present an efficient simulation method for an arbitrary number of copies by utilizing the relationship between HM and state fidelity. Our method reveals that the classification performance does not improve monotonically with the number of data copies. Instead, it needs to be treated as a hyperparameter subject to optimization, achievable only through the method proposed in this work. We present a Quantum-Inspired Machine Learning binary classifier with excellent performance, providing such empirical evidence by benchmarking on eight datasets and comparing it with 13 hyperparameter optimized standard classifiers.
This paper proposes a new quantum-like method for the binary classification applied to classical datasets. Inspired by the quantum Helstrom measurement, this innovative approach has enabled us to define a new classifier, called Helstrom Quantum Centroid (HQC). This binary classifier (inspired by the concept of distinguishability between quantum states) acts on density matrices-called density patterns-that are the quantum encoding of classical patterns of a dataset. In this paper we compare the performance of HQC with respect to twelve standard (linear and non-linear) classifiers over fourteen different datasets. The experimental results show that HQC outperforms the other classifiers when compared to the Balanced Accuracy and other statistical measures. Finally, we show that the performance of our classifier is positively correlated to the increase in the number of "quantum copies" of a pattern and the resulting tensor product thereof.
Optimal measurements for the discrimination of quantum states are useful tools for classification problems. In order to exploit the potential of quantum computers, feature vectors have to be encoded into quantum states represented by density operators. However, quantum-inspired classifiers based on nearest mean and on Helstrom state discrimination are implemented on classical computers. We show a geometric approach that improves the efficiency of quantum-inspired classification in terms of space and time acting on quantum encoding and allows one to compare classifiers correctly in the presence of multiple preparations of the same quantum state as input. We also introduce the nearest mean classification based on Bures distance, Hellinger distance and Jensen-Shannon distance comparing the performance with respect to well-known classifiers applied to benchmark datasets.
We present algorithms for supervised classification tasks in machine learning that are inspired by quantum mechanics. They rely on the so-called problem of quantum state discrimination, which consists in identifying which one of a known set of quantum states has been prepared based on the outcome of a quantum measurement on the state. After building the quantum states associated with the training data, which are encoded as density matrices, we explore various quantum measurement strategies suited for the classification task, including those based on semi-definite programming and on the so-called Pretty GoodMeasurement.We also consider how the measurement performs on multiple copies of the quantum state, since this in principle improves quantum state discrimination at the price of a higher computational cost. For the Pretty Good Measurement classifier, an analogue of the well-known Kernel Trick in learning theory can be devised, so that the cost scales only with the number of examples in the training dataset. This allows to study the performance of this classifier on tensor products of the quantum state. Finally, thedifferent classifiers are benchmarked on the MNIST and MNIST-1D datasets.
Quantum-inspired machine learning is a new branch of machine learning based on the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to devise novel algorithms for classical computers.We implement some quantum-inspired classification algorithms, based on quantum state discrimination, within a local approach in the feature space by taking into account elements close to the element to be classified.This local approach improves the accuracy in classification and motivates the integration with the classifiers.The quantum-inspired classifiers require the encoding of the feature vectors into density operators and methods for estimating the distinguishability of quantum states like the Helstrom state discrimination and the Pretty-Good measurement.We present a comparison of the performances of the local quantum-inspired classifiers against well-known classical algorithms in order to show that the local approach can be a valuable tool for increasing the performances of this kind of classifiers.
The discovery of quantum algorithms offering provable advantages over the best known classical alternatives, together with the parallel ongoing revolution brought about by classical artificial intelligence, motivates a search for applications of quantum information processing methods to machine learning. Among several proposals in this domain, quantum kernel methods have emerged as particularly promising candidates. However, while some rigorous speedups on certain highly specific problems have been formally proven, only empirical proof-of-principle results have been reported so far for real-world datasets. Moreover, no systematic procedure is known, in general, to fine tune and optimize the performances of kernel-based quantum classification algorithms. At the same time, certain limitations such as kernel concentration effects-hindering the trainability of quantum classifiers-have also been recently pointed out. In this work, we propose several general-purpose optimization methods and best practices designed to enhance the practical usefulness of fidelity-based quantum classification algorithms. Specifically, we first describe a data pre-processing strategy that, by preserving the relevant relationships between data points when processed through quantum feature maps, substantially alleviates the effect of kernel concentration on structured datasets. We also introduce a classical post-processing method that, based on standard fidelity measures estimated on a quantum processor, yields non-linear decision boundaries in the feature Hilbert space, thus achieving the quantum counterpart of the radial basis functions technique that is widely employed in classical kernel methods. Finally, we apply the so-called quantum metric learning protocol to engineer and adjust trainable quantum embeddings, demonstrating substantial performance improvements on several paradigmatic real-world classification tasks.
Pattern recognition is a central topic in learning theory, with numerous applications such as voice and text recognition, image analysis and computer diagnosis. The statistical setup in classification is the following: we are given an i.i.d. training set ( X 1 , Y 1 ), ... , ( X n , Y n ), where X i represents a feature and Y i ∊{0, 1} is a label attached to that feature. The underlying joint distribution of ( X , Y ) is unknown, but we can learn about it from the training set, and we aim at devising low error classifiers f: X → Y used to predict the label of new incoming features. In this paper, we solve a quantum analogue of this problem, namely the classification of two arbitrary unknown mixed qubit states. Given a number of 'training' copies from each of the states, we would like to 'learn' about them by performing a measurement on the training set. The outcome is then used to design measurements for the classification of future systems with unknown labels. We found the asymptotically optimal classification strategy and show that typically it performs strictly better than a plug-in strategy, which consists of estimating the states separately and then discriminating between them using the Helstrom measurement. The figure of merit is given by the excess risk equal to the difference between the probability of error and the probability of error of the optimal measurement for known states. We show that the excess risk scales as n −1 and compute the exact constant of the rate.