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Frontiers in Physics

Quantum K-nearest neighbors classification algorithm based on Mahalanobis distance

Lizhen Gao, Chun-Yue Lu, Gongde Guo, Xin Zhang, Song Lin

Published Oct 21, 2022• 33 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Mahalanobis distance is a distance measure that takes into account the relationship between features. In this paper, we proposed a quantum KNN classification algorithm based on the Mahalanobis distance, which combines the classical KNN algorithm with quantum computing to solve supervised classification problem in machine learning. Firstly, a quantum sub-algorithm for searching the minimum of disordered data set is utilized to find out K nearest neighbors of the testing sample. Finally, its category can be obtained by counting the categories of K nearest neighbors. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed quantum algorithm has the effect of squared acceleration compared with the classical counterpart.

DOI
10.3389/fphy.2022.1047466

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Mahalanobis distance is a distance measure that takes into account the relationship between features. In this paper, we proposed a quantum KNN classification algorithm based on the Mahalanobis distance, which combines the classical KNN algorithm with quantum computing to solve supervised classification problem in machine learning. Firstly, a quantum sub-algorithm for searching the minimum of disordered data set is utilized to find out K nearest neighbors of the testing sample. Finally, its category can be obtained by counting the categories of K nearest neighbors. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed quantum algorithm has the effect of squared acceleration compared with the classical counterpart.
Image classification is an important task in the field of machine learning and image processing. However, the usually used classification method --- the K Nearest-Neighbor algorithm has high complexity, because its two main processes: similarity computing and searching are time-consuming. Especially in the era of big data, the problem is prominent when the amount of images to be classified is large. In this paper, we try to use the powerful parallel computing ability of quantum computers to optimize the efficiency of image classification. The scheme is based on quantum K Nearest-Neighbor algorithm. Firstly, the feature vectors of images are extracted on classical computers. Then the feature vectors are inputted into a quantum superposition state, which is used to achieve parallel computing of similarity. Next, the quantum minimum search algorithm is used to speed up searching process for similarity. Finally, the image is classified by quantum measurement. The complexity of the quantum algorithm is only O((kM)^(1/2)), which is superior to the classical algorithms. Moreover, the measurement step is executed only once to ensure the validity of the scheme. The experimental results show that, the classification accuracy is 83.1% on Graz-01 dataset and 78% on Caltech-101 dataset, which is close to existing classical algorithms. Hence, our quantum scheme has a good classification performance while greatly improving the efficiency.
One of the simplest and most effective classical machine learning algorithms is the kkk-nearest neighbors algorithm (kkkNN) which classifies an unknown test state by finding the kkk nearest neighbors from a set of MMM train states. Here we present a quantum analog of classical kkkNN −-− quantum kkkNN (QkkkNN) −-− based on fidelity as the similarity measure. We show that QkkkNN algorithm can be reduced to an instance of the quantum kkk-maxima algorithm, hence the query complexity of QkkkNN is O(kM)O(\sqrt{kM})O(kM​). The non-trivial task in this reduction is to encode the fidelity information between the test state and all the train states as amplitudes of a quantum state. Converting this amplitude encoded information to a digital format enables us to compare them efficiently, thus completing the reduction. Unlike classical kkkNN and existing quantum kkkNN algorithms, the proposed algorithm can be directly used on quantum data thereby bypassing expensive processes such as quantum state tomography. As an example, we show the applicability of this algorithm in entanglement classification and quantum state discrimination.
Although multi-label k-nearest neighbor (ML-kNN) is able to effectively solve multi-label learning (MLL) problem with local neighborhood similarity, its time complexity is nearly unacceptable with large-scale datasets. To solve this issue, we propose a novel ML-kNN algorithm with quantum computing techniques, which called quantum multi-label k-nearest neighbor (QML-kNN). In particular, we first accelerate the calculation of the prior probability by taking advantage of quantum phase estimation and Grover's amplitude amplification. Then, a controlled-SWAP test and a quantum k-maximal similarity search are used for efficiently identifying the neighbors. Subsequently, a quantum parallel counting circuit (QPCC) is designed to rapidly calculate the posterior probabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that QML-kNN is able to significantly reduce the time complexity of solving multi-label problems with performance improvement, achieving a substantial speedup over the classical MLL algorithm.
The KNN (K-nearest neighbors) algorithm is one of Top-10 data mining algorithms and is widely used in various fields of artificial intelligence. This leads to that quantum KNN algorithms have developed and achieved certain speed improvements, denoted as Q-KNN. However, these Q-KNN methods must face two key problems as follows. The first one is that they are mainly focused on neighbor selection without paying attention to the influence of K value on the algorithm. The second is that only the neighbor selection process is quantized, and the selection of K value is not quantized. To solve these problems, this paper designs a novel quantum circuit for KNN classification, so as to simultaneously quantumize the neighbor selection and K value selection process. Specifically, the least squares loss and sparse regularization term are first used to construct the objective function of the proposed quantum KNN, so that it can simultaneously obtain the optimal K value and K nearest neighbors of the testing data. And then, a new quantum circuit is proposed to quantumize the process through quantum phase estimation, controlled rotation, and inverse phase estimation techniques. Finally, experiments are conducted with qiskit and matlab to output the quantum and classical results of the algorithm, verifying that the proposed algorithm can output the optimal K value and K nearest neighbors for each testing data.
Abstract The K‐nearest neighbor algorithm is one of the most frequently applied supervised machine learning algorithms. Similarity computing is considered to be the most crucial and time‐consuming step among the classical K‐nearest neighbor algorithm. A quantum K‐nearest neighbor algorithm is proposed based on the divide‐and‐conquer strategy. A quantum circuit is designed to calculate the fidelity between the test sample and each feature vector of the training dataset. The quantum K‐nearest neighbor algorithm has higher classification efficiency in high‐dimensional data processing. The classification accuracy of the proposed algorithm is equivalent to that of the classical K‐nearest neighbor algorithm under the IRIS dataset. In addition, compared with the typical quantum K‐nearest neighbor algorithms, the proposed classification method possesses higher classification accuracy with less calculation time, which has wide applications in the industrial field.
Text classification is one of key problems in pattern recognition. The KNN algorithm is a widely used text classification algorithm, because it is simple, valid and non-parameters. The main idea of KNN algorithm is to calculate the similarity between the new sample with unknown class label and the training samples, and choosing the class label of the highest k nearest neighbors as the new sample's class label. However, the text contains hundreds and thousands of features. The similarity computing in large numbers of vector will cost many time. In fact that, many machine learning algorithms are unable to manipulate and compute large number of vectors in high-dimensional space. Quantum computing algorithms are good at computing high-dimensional vectors in large tensor product spaces. It can provide exponential speed-up over its classical counterparts. The N-dimensional quantum vectors represent 2N quantum superposition states. The similarity computing on the N-dimensional vectors is also on the 2N quantum superposition states simultaneously. Therefore, this paper introduces a KNN algorithms based on quantum computing, which uses fidelity to compute the similarity between two quantum states. The Control-Swap Test gate is very convenient as a fidelity estimator.