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arXiv:2603.13441

Filtered Spectral Projection for Quantum Principal Component Analysis

Sk Mujaffar Hossain, Satadeep Bhattacharjee

Published Mar 13, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum principal component analysis (qPCA) is commonly formulated as the extraction of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a covariance-encoded density operator. Yet in many qPCA settings the practical goal is simpler: projection onto the dominant spectral subspace. Here we introduce a projection-first framework, the Filtered Spectral Projection Algorithm (FSPA), which bypasses explicit eigenvalue estimation while preserving the relevant spectral structure. FSPA amplifies any nonzero warm-start overlap with the leading subspace and remains robust in small-gap and near-degenerate regimes, without artificial symmetry breaking in the absence of bias. We show that FSPA achieves an oracle complexity $\mathcal{O}((\log(1/ε)+\log(1/|a_1|^2))/\log(λ_1/λ_2))$,which is tight by a matching lower bound, establishing it as an\emph{optimal} projection primitive. We derive a convergence rate for degenerate spectra, give a circuit resource analysis with $n+\mathcal{O}(1)$ qubit overhead independent of system dimension, and extend the method to threshold spectral projection, Threshold-FSPA, which converges in $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/ε))$ calls when the threshold lies between eigenvalues. In the density matrix exponentiation access model, FSPA gives an exponential copy-complexity advantage over classical methods. For classical datasets, we show that for amplitude-encoded centered data the ensemble density matrix $ρ=\sum_i p_i|ψ_i\rangle\langleψ_i|$ equals the covariance matrix. Numerical tests on chemistry density matrices, noisy circuit outputs, Breast Cancer Wisconsin, handwritten Digits, and 1--4-qubit scalability confirm the theory. A minimal Qiskit implementation validates magnitude invariance, signal amplification, and no spurious symmetry breaking. These results establish FSPA as an optimal and deployable quantum spectral projection primitive.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2603.13441

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Quantum Principal Component Analysis (QPCA) offers a theoretical exponential speedup over classical PCA, but its practical performance under realistic conditions remains underexplored. This work-in-progress research investigates QPCA's viability by implementing a Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE)based QPCA circuit using Qiskit and benchmarking it on ten well known classical datasets in the IBM Quantum simulator environment. We evaluated both the fidelity of eigenvalue and eigenvector reconstruction as well as the downstream impact of QPCA versus classical PCA on regression and classification tasks. Our results confirm that QPCA can reproduce classical eigenvalues with high precision (error<10−4<10^{-4}<10−4), but its eigenvector fidelity degrades in cases of near-degenerate spectra. We further observe that PCA benefits classification more consistently than regression, regardless of the implementation method. These findings establish a preliminary empirical foundation for understanding QPCA's strengths and limitations and serve as a baseline for future work incorporating hardware noise, scalable circuit design, and hybrid approaches.