Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) predicts future values of multiple variables from historical data. While quantum neural networks have been increasingly applied to this task, they typically rely on fixed local measurements, which restrict their expressivity. We propose MTSF-ANO, a simple hybrid model for MTSF that integrates variational quantum circuits with adaptive non-local observables (ANO). On the four ETT datasets, MTSF-ANO ranks first or second in MSE in 17 of 20 settings, improving over the strongest baseline by up to 20% on ETTh1, and outperforms or matches its fixed local observable counterpart across all settings. Our ablations show how the quantum circuit design and ANO non-locality affect performance. These results suggest that ANO is a promising direction for quantum time series forecasting.
Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) predicts future values of multiple variables from historical data. While quantum neural networks have been increasingly applied to this task, they typically rely on fixed local measurements, which restrict their expressivity. We propose MTSF-ANO, a simple hybrid model for MTSF that integrates variational quantum circuits with adaptive non-local observables (ANO). On the four ETT datasets, MTSF-ANO ranks first or second in MSE in 17 of 20 settings, improving over the strongest baseline by up to 20% on ETTh1, and outperforms or matches its fixed local observable counterpart across all settings. Our ablations show how the quantum circuit design and ANO non-locality affect performance. These results suggest that ANO is a promising direction for quantum time series forecasting.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are typically built from variational quantum circuits (VQCs), which are limited by local measurements. Adaptive non-local observables (ANO) address this by jointly optimizing circuit parameters and multi-qubit measurements. However, existing ANO-based VQCs learn only a single static observable that remains invariant across all inputs. We propose QFWP-ANO, a novel architecture which employs a classical hypernetwork to dynamically program VQC parameters and/or non-local observables conditioned on each input. On multivariate time-series forecasting across four ETT datasets, QFWP-ANO achieves the lowest MSE in 16 of 20 settings and second-lowest in the remaining four, surpassing ANO-based and other strong baselines. On reinforcement learning tasks, QFWP-ANO consistently surpasses ANO-VQCs. Our results establish input-conditioned ANO as an effective approach for enhancing QNNs.
In this paper, we address the challenge of multivariate time-series forecasting using quantum machine learning techniques. We introduce adaptation strategies that extend variational quantum circuit models, traditionally limited to univariate data, toward the multivariate setting, exploring both purely quantum and hybrid quantum-classical formulations. First, we extend and benchmark several VQC-based and hybrid architectures to systematically evaluate their capacity to model cross-variable dependencies. Second, building upon these foundations, we introduce the iQTransformer, a novel quantum transformer architecture that integrates a quantum self-attention mechanism within the iTransformer framework, enabling a quantum-native representation of inter-variable relationships. Third, we provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets, showing that quantum-based models may achieve competitive or superior forecasting accuracy with fewer trainable parameters and faster convergence than state-of-the-art classical and quantum baselines in some cases. These contributions highlight the potential of quantum-enhanced architectures as efficient and scalable tools for advancing multivariate time-series forecasting.
Abstract In this paper, we address the challenge of multivariate time-series forecasting through quantum-enhanced machine learning architectures. We propose adaptation strategies that extend variational quantum circuit models (VQC), traditionally constrained to univariate data, toward the multivariate setting, exploring both purely quantum and hybrid quantum-classical formulations. First, we extend and benchmark several VQC-based and hybrid models to systematically evaluate their ability to capture cross-variable dependencies. Building on these foundations, we introduce the iQTransformer, a novel quantum transformer architecture that integrates a quantum self-attention mechanism within the iTransformer framework, enabling a quantum-native representation of inter-variable relationships. Finally, we present a comprehensive empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that quantum-enhanced models can achieve competitive or superior forecasting accuracy with fewer trainable parameters and faster convergence than state-of-the-art classical and quantum baselines. These findings highlight the potential of quantum-enhanced architectures as efficient and scalable tools for advancing multivariate time-series forecasting.
Hybrid quantum-classical frameworks leverage quantum computing for machine learning; however, variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are limited by local measurements. We introduce an adaptive non-local observable (ANO) paradigm within VQCs for quantum reinforcement learning (QRL), jointly optimizing circuit parameters and multi-qubit measurements. The ANO-VQC architecture serves as the function approximator in Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithms. On multiple benchmark tasks, ANOVQC agents outperform baseline VQCs. Ablation studies reveal that adaptive measurements enhance the function space without increasing circuit depth. Our results demonstrate that adaptive multi-qubit observables can enable practical quantum advantages in reinforcement learning.
Time-series forecasting is vital across sectors such as finance, energy, and environmental science, where accurate future predictions drive informed decision-making. Traditional statistical methods and deep learning models like LSTM and Transformers, while effective, often struggle with high-dimensional data and long-term dependencies. In this paper, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical model that utilizes Parameterized Quantum Circuits (PQCs) to capture complex temporal patterns in multivariate time-series data. Our architecture integrates a classical encoder, a quantum variational processor, and a classical decoder, trained end-to-end using gradient-based optimization. Experiments conducted on benchmark datasets—electricity load, stock prices, and weather forecasting—demonstrate that the hybrid model consistently outperforms classical baselines in terms of Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and R² score. Robustness analysis confirms the model’s resilience to moderate quantum noise, while an ablation study highlights the performance gain from quantum components. This work showcases the potential of hybrid quantum-classical approaches on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices and lays a foundation for scalable, real-world quantum machine learning applications.
Forecasting physiological signals can support proactive monitoring and timely clinical intervention by anticipating critical changes in patient status. In this work, we address multivariate multi-horizon forecasting of physiological time series by jointly predicting heart rate, oxygen saturation, pulse rate, and respiratory rate at forecasting horizons of 15, 30, and 60 seconds. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical architecture that integrates a Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) within a recurrent neural backbone. A GRU encoder summarizes the historical observation window into a latent representation, which is then projected into quantum angles used to parameterize the VQC. The quantum layer acts as a learnable non-linear feature mixer, modeling cross-variable interactions before the final prediction stage. We evaluate the proposed approach on the BIDMC PPG and Respiration dataset under a Leave-One-Patient-Out protocol. The results show competitive accuracy compared with classical and deep learning baselines, together with greater robustness to noise and missing inputs. These findings suggest that hybrid quantum layers can provide useful inductive biases for physiological time series forecasting in small-cohort clinical settings. The code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/quantum-ml.