We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.
13 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; typos corrected, new references added, modification of model M3, new result box plots for all models, theoretical results adjusted, abstract and conclusion modified
We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.
This study investigates classification performance and trainability of variational quantum classifiers on near-term noisy quantum hardware across circuit depth and qubit count regimes within the context of quantum computing and machine learning, an area of growing scientific importance given its implications for hybrid quantum-classical algorithm design and practical NISQ hardware benchmarking for near-term quantum advantage assessment. Using gradient-based parameter optimization of parameterized quantum circuits with hardware noise modeling via density matrix simulation and physical execution on IBM Eagle processors, we examine expressibility of parameterized circuits enabling nonlinear decision boundaries in feature Hilbert space, with trainability constrained by barren plateau gradients at large qubit counts in 96 circuit architectures (4 qubit counts x 4 depths x 6 ansatz families) evaluated across 5 classification datasets with 20 random initialization seeds each drawn from IBM Quantum Eagle (127-qubit) and Falcon (27-qubit) processors with noise mitigation via zero-noise extrapolation. Results indicate that 10-qubit, 4-layer VQC achieves 84.2% classification accuracy on the best benchmark, within 3.8 percentage points of classical SVM, but gradient variance decays exponentially with qubit count (variance halving per 2 added qubits), confirming barren plateau scaling (p < 0.001), with 84.2% accuracy, 3.8 pp gap to classical SVM baseline as the primary quantitative benchmark. Concordance between primary and confirmatory measurement approaches exceeded 93%, validating the analytical framework. These findings contribute empirically to quantum computing and machine learning and carry actionable implications for the design of programs and policies targeting hybrid quantum-classical algorithm design and practical NISQ hardware benchmarking for near-term quantum advantage assessment.
In the current era, known as Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ), encoding large amounts of data in the quantum devices is challenging and the impact of noise significantly affects the quality of the obtained results. A viable approach for the execution of quantum classification algorithms is the introduction of a well-known machine learning paradigm, namely, the ensemble methods. Indeed, the ensembles combine multiple internal classifiers, which are characterized by compact sizes due to the smaller data subsets used for training, to achieve more accurate and robust prediction performance. In this way, it is possible to reduce the qubit requirements with respect to a single larger classifier while achieving comparable or improved performance. In this work, we present an implementation and an extensive empirical evaluation of ensembles of quantum instance-based classifiers for binary classification, with the purpose of providing insights into their effectiveness, limitations, and potential for enhancing the performance of basic quantum models. In particular, three classical ensemble methods and three quantum instance-based classifiers have been taken into account here. Hence, the scheme that has been implemented (in Python) has a hybrid nature. The results (obtained on real-world datasets) have shown an accuracy advantage for the ensemble techniques with respect to the single quantum classifiers, and also an improvement in robustness. In fact, ensembles have proven effective not only in mitigating unsuitable data normalizations but also in reducing the impact of noise on quantum classifiers, enhancing their stability.
Accurate and timely diagnosis of breast cancer greatly improves treatment effectiveness and patient survival. In this work, we have suggested a quantum-classical framework for breast cancer classification. The pipeline starts with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to preserve 90-95% of the dataset variance. Then feature selection is done with Random Forest and Recursive Feature Elimination, retaining the top 10 strongest features. The features are normalized and fed to a Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) Classifier built with the Pennylane library. The VQC employs a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) with multiple rotation gates and entanglement layers and is run over a simulator. The experimental results demonstrate that the VQC attained a classification test accuracy of 96.49% and AUC-ROC of 0.9985 over the test set. The model has produced robust generalization performance, shown by its excellent performance over unknown data. Results indicate that the VQC competes with the benchmarked classical models and has potential benefits in terms of applicability and scalability to healthcare applications in terms of accuracy. This work emphasizes the synergy of classical preprocessing and quantum classification in designing efficient and interpretable healthcare applications.
Variational quantum classifiers combine parameterised quantum circuits with classical optimisa-tion to perform supervised classification, but their practical performance depends strongly on circuit architecture, trainability, and hardware-resource requirements. Current noisy intermediate-scalequantum devices further constrain these models through limited usable circuit depth, hardwarenoise, and expensive quantum-circuit evaluations, motivating systematic benchmarking undercontrolled conditions.This thesis investigates how the structure of an interaction-based ansatz influences the behaviourof a hybrid quantum–classical classifier. A ZZ-only IsingZZ ansatz is compared with the proposed Arivoli ansatz, which combines XX-, Y Y -, and ZZ-type interaction channels between neigh-bouring qubits. The primary architecture comparison uses IsingZZ with three repeated nearest-neighbour ladders and Arivoli with one ladder, with nine nominal optimisation parameters in each implementation.Classical data are reduced to four features and encoded on four qubits using arcsin-RY rotations.The resulting quantum states are processed by the parameterised ansatz and measured usingAll-Qubit Multi-Observable Measurement (AMM), producing X-, Y -, and Z-expectation valuesthat are classified by a linear softmax readout. The architectures are evaluated on benchmark classification datasets using predictive performance, optimisation behaviour, expressibility, en-tangling capability, and circuit-resource metrics. Classical baselines and IBM Quantum execution are additionally used to assess the practical relevance and hardware behaviour of the proposedframework.The study does not seek to demonstrate quantum advantage. Instead, it examines the trade-offs between representational capability, optimisation behaviour, classification performance, and hard-ware cost in variational quantum classifier design. The results are used to assess whether richer multi-axis interactions provide practically useful behaviour under near-term quantum-computingconstraints.
Quantum machine learning (QML) is considered one of the most promising applications of quantum computing in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era for the impact it is thought to have in the near future. Although promising theoretical assumptions, the exploration of how QML could foster new discoveries in medicine and biology fields is still in its infancy with few examples. In this study, we aim to assess whether quantum kernels (QK) could effectively classify subtypes of breast cancer (BC) patients based on molecular characteristics. We performed a heuristic exploration of encoding configurations with different entanglement levels to determine a trade-off between kernel expressivity and performances. Our results show that QKs yield comparable clustering results with classical methods while using fewer data points and are able to fit the data with a higher number of clusters. Additionally, we conducted the experiments on the quantum processing unit (QPU) to evaluate the effect of noise on the outcome. We found that less expressive encodings showed a higher resilience to noise, indicating that the computational pipeline can be reliably implemented on NISQ devices. Our findings suggest that QK methods show promises for application in precision oncology, especially in scenarios where the dataset is limited in size and a granular non-trivial stratification of complex molecular data cannot be achieved classically.
In recent years, quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as a promising approach for medical decision-making, with representative methods such as Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs), Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), and Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs). Among these, VQCs are distinguished by their expressive capability; however, their training on small biomedical datasets often results in instability and high variance. To address this issue, we propose a heterogeneous ensemble of six shallow VQCs evaluated on the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Diagnostic (WBCD) dataset, which contains 569 diagnostic samples characterized by 30 cytological features and binary class labels differentiating benign and malignant cases. The ensemble introduces diversity through distinct feature maps, circuit architectures, and optimization strategies, using rotation gates (RX, RY, RZ) combined with entangling layers (CNOT, CZ). Model reliability is estimated from out-of-bag errors, with normalized weights calculated as the inverse of the mean squared error, and final decisions obtained via weighted soft voting. The preprocessing pipeline involves median imputation and standardization, followed by principal component analysis (PCA) to compress the 30-dimensional space into three to four principal components for quantum encoding. In our experiments, individual VQCs trained on the full dataset exhibited unstable accuracies ranging from 80% to 96% across three–four qubits, whereas the proposed ensemble achieved consistent performance of 95.71% (3 qubits) and 96.43% (4 qubits), reducing variance and matching strong classical baselines such as SVM and Random Forest. All models were implemented in PennyLane, utilizing the Lightning.qubit simulator for shot-free optimization and the default.mixed device for noise-aware evaluation, demonstrating the potential of weighted quantum ensembles for reliable biomedical classification.