Quantum kernel methods are promising for near-term quantum ma- chine learning, yet their behavior under data corruption remains insuf- ficiently understood. We analyze how quantum feature constructions degrade under controlled additive noise. We introduce Spectral Phase Encoding (SPE), a hybrid construc- tion combining a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) front-end with a diagonal phase-only embedding aligned with the geometry of diagonal quantum maps. Within a unified framework, we compare QK-DFT against alternative quantum variants (QK-PCA, QK-RP) and classi- cal SVM baselines under identical clean-data hyperparameter selection, quantifying robustness via dataset fixed-effects regression with wild cluster bootstrap inference across heterogeneous real-world datasets. Across the quantum family, DFT-based preprocessing yields the smallest degradation rate as noise increases, with statistically sup- ported slope differences relative to PCA and RP. Compared to classical baselines, QK-DFT shows degradation comparable to linear SVM and more stable than RBF SVM under matched tuning. Hardware exper- iments confirm that SPE remains executable and numerically stable for overlap estimation. These results indicate that robustness in quan- tum kernels depends critically on structure-aligned preprocessing and its interaction with diagonal embeddings, supporting a robustness-first perspective for NISQ-era quantum machine learning.
Quantum kernel methods are promising for near-term quantum ma- chine learning, yet their behavior under data corruption remains insuf- ficiently understood. We analyze how quantum feature constructions degrade under controlled additive noise. We introduce Spectral Phase Encoding (SPE), a hybrid construc- tion combining a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) front-end with a diagonal phase-only embedding aligned with the geometry of diagonal quantum maps. Within a unified framework, we compare QK-DFT against alternative quantum variants (QK-PCA, QK-RP) and classi- cal SVM baselines under identical clean-data hyperparameter selection, quantifying robustness via dataset fixed-effects regression with wild cluster bootstrap inference across heterogeneous real-world datasets. Across the quantum family, DFT-based preprocessing yields the smallest degradation rate as noise increases, with statistically sup- ported slope differences relative to PCA and RP. Compared to classical baselines, QK-DFT shows degradation comparable to linear SVM and more stable than RBF SVM under matched tuning. Hardware exper- iments confirm that SPE remains executable and numerically stable for overlap estimation. These results indicate that robustness in quan- tum kernels depends critically on structure-aligned preprocessing and its interaction with diagonal embeddings, supporting a robustness-first perspective for NISQ-era quantum machine learning.
Abstract Quantum kernel methods are promising for near-term quantum machine learning, yet their behavior under data corruption remains insufficiently understood. We analyze how quantum feature constructions degrade under controlled additive noise. We introduce Spectral Phase Encoding (SPE), a hybrid construction combining a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) front-end with a diagonal phase-only embedding. Within a unified framework, we compare the resulting DFT-based quantum-kernel pipeline () against alternative quantum variants based on principal component analysis (PCA) and random projections (RP), as well as classical support vector machine (SVM) baselines, under identical clean-data hyperparameter selection. Robustness is quantified via dataset fixed-effects regression with wild cluster bootstrap inference across heterogeneous real-world datasets. Across the matched quantum family, DFT-based preprocessing yields the smallest degradation rate as noise increases, with statistically supported slope differences relative to PCA and RP. Compared with classical baselines, shows degradation comparable to linear SVM and more favorable than radial basis function (RBF) SVM under the present tuning protocol. Hardware experiments further confirm that the resulting overlap-estimation primitive remains executable and numerically stable. Taken together, these results support a robustness-first view of quantum kernel evaluation and show that, within the controlled pipeline family studied here, structure-aligned spectral preprocessing combined with a shared diagonal quantum embedding can yield slower degradation under corruption.
Quantum machine learning is often motivated by the idea that quantum systems can expose useful high-dimensional structure that is difficult to access with classical models. We isolate one central component of this claim: the fixed data-encoding map. Amplitude, angle, and basis encoding are evaluated as deterministic feature maps for classical supervised learning under matched output dimensionality and strong classical controls. The benchmark compares these encodings against raw linear models, random Fourier features, polynomial features, PCA, RBF SVMs, and shallow neural networks across diverse classical datasets. Rather than treating performance as a single endpoint, we analyze the geometry of each representation through effective rank, condition number, centered kernel alignment, predictive performance, and practical overhead. The resulting picture is mechanistic: amplitude encoding can remove magnitude information through unit-sphere normalization, angle encoding can become geometrically redundant with raw linear features, and basis encoding can impose a binary Hamming geometry that is poorly aligned with smooth decision structure. These findings do not argue against quantum computation, however, they show that fixed quantum-inspired encoding geometry alone is not a reliable source of machine-learning advantage on classical data.
Quantum kernel methods have been proposed as a promising approach for leveraging near-term quantum computers for supervised learning, yet rigorous benchmarks against strong classical baselines remain scarce. We present a comprehensive empirical study of quantum kernel support vector machines (QSVMs) across nine binary classification datasets, four quantum feature maps, three classical kernels, and multiple noise models, totalling 970 experiments with strict nested cross-validation.
Our analysis spans four phases: (i) statistical significance testing, revealing that none of 29 pairwise quantum-classical comparisons reach significance at α=0.05; (ii) learning curve analysis over six training fractions, showing steeper quantum slopes on six of eight datasets that nonetheless fail to close the gap to the best classical baseline; (iii) hardware validation on IBM ibm_fez (Heron r2), demonstrating kernel fidelity r≥0.976 across six experiments; and (iv) seed sensitivity analysis confirming reproducibility (mean CV 1.4%).
A Kruskal-Wallis factorial analysis reveals that dataset choice dominates performance variance (ε2=0.73), while kernel type accounts for only 9%. Spectral analysis offers a mechanistic explanation: current quantum feature maps produce eigenspectra that are either too flat or too concentrated, missing the intermediate profile of the best classical kernel, the radial basis function (RBF). Quantum kernel training (QKT) via kernel-target alignment yields the single competitive result -- balanced accuracy 0.968 on breast cancer -- but with ~2,000x computational overhead.
Our findings provide actionable guidelines for quantum kernel research. The complete benchmark suite is publicly available to facilitate reproduction and extension.
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.
Quantum kernel methods are the most concrete near-term proposal for quantum machine learning on classical data, yet published benchmarks disagree on whether they outperform tuned classical kernels, and the disagreement cannot be resolved from the literature because the comparisons are not protocol-controlled. We argue that the obstacle is one of measurement, not theory: the usual setup fixes the quantum feature map's data scaling while grid-searching the classical kernel's hyperparameters, recomputes nothing per fold, and reports cost in simulator time. We therefore treat the comparison itself as the object of study and impose three controls. The bandwidth is tuned on the same grid budget as the classical γ, the kernel is recomputed inside every fold from fold-fitted preprocessing, and cost is counted in hardware circuit evaluations. On top of these we run a factorial design of 324 cells in which dimensionality, training size, class separability and data structure are explicit covariates, together with four standard datasets, a shots-versus-gate-noise ablation, and a cost sweep. The dominant effect we measure is not quantum: tuning the feature map's bandwidth is worth 0.120 accuracy on synthetic data and 0.339 on real data, exceeding every quantum-classical difference we observe. Tuned quantum kernels are then statistically indistinguishable from a tuned RBF on all four real datasets. The advantage on synthetic data is confined almost entirely to data generated by the feature map itself, and it shrinks with dimensionality (-0.0045 per qubit) while growing with sample size. Finite sampling costs an order of magnitude more accuracy than gate and readout noise, and a fidelity kernel needs 5×107 circuits at n = 10,000. Protocol variance is thus sufficient to explain the field's contradictory conclusions.
This thesis presents a systematic empirical evaluation of quantum machine learning performance under noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era constraints. Through 670 controlled experiments, it evaluated quantum kernel support vector machines and variational quantum classifiers against classical baselines on MNIST binary and multiclass classification tasks with systematic variation of problem difficulty, feature dimensionality (4, 8 qubits), and training set size (n ∈{100, 250, 400, 500, 2000, 4000}). Statistical rigor was ensured through five random seeds per condition and comprehensive significance testing. During the testing with binary datasets, classical methods (SVM, logistic regression, k-NN, neural networks) achieved 85.9% to 99.6% accuracy with training times under one second across all sample sizes. Quantum kernel methods utilizing ZZ feature maps yielded 70.5% to 96.0% accuracy, requiring 129 to 2,140 seconds training with quadratic sample size scaling. Larger scale quantum experiments (n = 4000 for both architectures, 8-qubit encoding with n = 2000 for quantum kernels) proved computationally impossible on available hardware leading to out of memory errors, highlighting practical NISQ-era scalability constraints. Variational quantum classifiers exhibited persistent performance stagnation, failing to exceed 66.5% accuracy despite increases in training data and feature dimensionality. Performance gaps ranged from 3.3 to 35.2 percentage points. All quantum classical differences achieved statistical significance (p< 0.05, with 13 of 14 comparisons meeting p< 0.01) and exhibited large to very large efect sizes (d> 1.0, with 13 of 14 comparisons exceeding d> 2.0). To further evaluate performance and scalability, a 4 class classification experiment was conducted following an identical experimental protocol, with training set sizes of n ∈{100, 250, 400}. Across 180 runs, classical baselines achieved mean accuracies between 87.2% and 95% across both 4 and 8 dimensional data. Quantum Kernel SVM struggled during runs with 4 dimensions, accuracy varying between 64.6% and 74%. Quantum Kernel SVM accuracy declined 16%-25% when the dimension and qubit count were increased to 8, showing findings of exponential kernel concentration. The Variational Quantum Classifier also performed poorly, with accuracy ranging from 43.4% to 44.6% across all runs, providing further evidence that it failed to leverage additional features or training data. Experiments employed noiseless statevector simulation, establishing that quantum underperformance stems from fundamental algorithmic limitations independent of hardware noise. A further extension to 8 class classification (digits 0–7) confirmed and amplified these findings: classical methods maintained 65–83% accuracy while Quantum Kernel SVM degraded to 34–47% and VQC collapsed to 21–23%, approaching the 12.5% random baseline. Supplementary appendix experiments further examined amplitude encoding on raw 784 dimensional pixel features and an alternative angle encoding scheme on the 8-class task; the latter demonstrated that replacing the ZZ Feature Map with simple per qubit rotations substantially recovered quantum kernel performance, suggesting feature map design as a more consequential variable than circuit depth or qubit count in near-term quantum classification.