We investigate two fundamental data encoding strategies for gate-based quantum computers: amplitude encoding and angle encoding. In amplitude encoding, a normalized -dimensional classical vector is mapped into the probability amplitudes of a -qubit quantum state, whereas angle encoding uses one or more single-qubit rotation gates per feature to encode data as angles.[1, 2] We construct a toy binary classification dataset with four real-valued features and compare these encoding schemes using a variational quantum classifier (VQC) approach. Our results indicate that angle encoding often yields slightly higher classification accuracy (e.g. 82% vs. 75% in one experiment) at the cost of requiring more qubits, while amplitude encoding compresses features into fewer qubits (2 vs. 4) but demands deeper state-preparation circuits. These findings align with previous studies that report higher accuracy for rotation encodings (e.g. vs. in MNIST experiments [3]) and note that the encoding choice acts as a hyperparameter affecting VQC performance. [4]
We investigate two fundamental data encoding strategies for gate-based quantum computers: amplitude encoding and angle encoding. In amplitude encoding, a normalized -dimensional classical vector is mapped into the probability amplitudes of a -qubit quantum state, whereas angle encoding uses one or more single-qubit rotation gates per feature to encode data as angles.[1, 2] We construct a toy binary classification dataset with four real-valued features and compare these encoding schemes using a variational quantum classifier (VQC) approach. Our results indicate that angle encoding often yields slightly higher classification accuracy (e.g. 82% vs. 75% in one experiment) at the cost of requiring more qubits, while amplitude encoding compresses features into fewer qubits (2 vs. 4) but demands deeper state-preparation circuits. These findings align with previous studies that report higher accuracy for rotation encodings (e.g. vs. in MNIST experiments [3]) and note that the encoding choice acts as a hyperparameter affecting VQC performance. [4]
ABSTRACT Recent advancements in Quantum Computing and Machine Learning have increased attention to Quantum Machine Learning (QML), which aims to develop machine learning models by exploiting the quantum computing paradigm. One of the widely used models in this area is the Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC), a hybrid model where the quantum circuit handles data inference while classical optimization adjusts the parameters of the circuit. The quantum circuit consists of an encoding layer, which loads data into the circuit, and a template circuit, known as the ansatz, responsible for processing the data. This work involves performing an analysis by considering both Amplitude‐ and Angle‐encoding models, and examining how the type of rotational gate applied affects the classification performance of the model. This comparison is carried out by training the different models on two datasets, Wine and Diabetes, and evaluating their performance. The study demonstrates that, under identical model topologies, the difference in accuracy between the best and worst models ranges from 10% to 30%, with differences reaching up to 41%. Moreover, the results highlight how the choice of rotational gates used in encoding can significantly impact the model's classification performance. The findings confirm that the embedding represents a hyperparameter for VQC models.
We perform image classification on the Honda Scenes Dataset on Quantinuum's H-2 and IBM's Heron chips utilizing up to 72 qubits and thousands of two-qubit gates. For data loading, we extend the hierarchical learning to the task of approximate amplitude encoding and block amplitude encoding for commercially relevant images up to 2 million pixels. Hierarchical learning enables the training of variational circuits with shallow enough resources to fit within the classification pipeline. For comparison, we also study how classifier performance is affected by using piecewise angle encoding. At the end of the VQC, we employ a fully-connected layer between measured qubits and the output classes. Some deployed models are able to achieve above 90\% accuracy even on test images. In comparing with classical models, we find we are able to achieve close to state of the art accuracy with relatively few parameters. These results constitute the largest quantum experiment for image classification to date.
Learning methodologies on quantum devices have shown that there are advantages in utilizing quantum properties. A requirement for using quantum computing in machine learning techniques is the data representation as quantum states. In Quantum Machine Learning, quantum state preparation is paramount to attain a functional pipeline in a model. One state preparation method, amplitude encoding, allows a dataset to be mapped or encoded more robustly and enhances the learning of quantum models. Albeit more densely represented, a dataset which has been prepared by amplitude encoding provides a more learnable input to a model. The two main advantages from using amplitude encoding are an increase in classification accuracy and reduced variability of learning epoch to epoch. In this paper, we compare the basic implementations of TensorFlow Quantum's Quantum Convolutional Neural Network and a hybrid quantum-classical network using angle encoding, with a third network of our design that utilizes amplitude encoding for enriched state preparation. Our results show there is a direct benefit in performing amplitude encoding before training a TensorFlow Quantum hybrid quantum-classical model. In the best case scenario, amplitude encoding made classifying the samples 8.9% more accurate.
Brain tumor image classification is an essential pre-processing task for tumor diagnosis and treatment planning. In medical imaging, quantum computing analyse medical imaging data, offering potential speedups and new representations compared to classical methods. The brain images are transformed through resizing and normalization to a uniform 32 × 32 × 3 resolution. Subsequently, these processed images are converted into vectors to enable encoding into quantum states. The feature set is reduced using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to ensure compatibility with the restricted qubit count in the quantum circuits. Through amplitude encoding, these vectors are mapped to quantum states, allowing for a compact and efficient data representation within the quantum domain. A parameterized Variational Quantum Circuit(VQC), consisting of entangling gates and trainable rotations, processes the encoded quantum states to learn features that can effectively discriminate between classes. The loss is calculated from the measured expectation values of Pauli-Z observables and optimized using classical gradient descent, where the objective function is the mean squared error. The trained quantum model is designed for multi-class classification, specifically distinguishing between meningioma, glioma tumors, pituitary tumors, and the absence of a tumor. The outcome of this proposed work demonstrates the VQC’s advantage over classical baselines, including Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The VQC achieved the highest accuracy of 95% and the best robustness (Specificity 0.983). Crucially, the VQC accomplished this using only 24 trainable parameters, showcasing a significant increase in parameter efficiency compared to the classical models. The novelty of this work is the quantitative demonstration that a custom-designed, resource-efficient quantum model can outperform established classical deep learning methods in both performance and efficiency for complex medical image classification. The VQC provides a 3.5-fold gain in parameter efficiency, achieving the highest accuracy of 95% using only 24 trainable parameters. This efficiency is enabled by the novel application of amplitude encoding to the medical images, which compresses 16 features into just 4 qubits. The VQC demonstrates robustness vital for medical diagnostics, achieving a Specificity of 0.983. Its shallow architecture is also NISQ-friendly and remains stable by avoiding the Barren Plateau issue (Gradient Norm: 0.11), validating the path toward quantum advantage in diagnostic tools. The results of this approach highlight the potential amplitude encoding in quantum machine learning, as a feasible and effective method for classifying real-world medical images. This work also opens avenues for future hybrid quantum-classical diagnostic systems that could utilize richer quantum state encodings for significant gains in computational efficiency and accuracy.
The way in which classical data are encoded into quantum states plays a significant role in both classification performance and quantum circuit complexity in Quantum Machine Learning. In this study, the effects of different quantum feature encoding strategies on Quantum Support Vector Machine performance were investigated using five binary classification datasets. In particular, the statistical relationships between features were incorporated into quantum circuits through RY(θ) and controlled-RY(θ) gates, and this approach was compared with conventional quantum feature maps. The results demonstrate that incorporating statistical relationships into the encoding process can influence classification performance. However, more complex and densely entangled circuits do not necessarily yield higher performance. In addition, a composite evaluation metric was employed to jointly assess predictive performance, generalization, and circuit cost. The findings across the five datasets indicate that the choice of quantum feature encoding strategy should account for the underlying structure of the data and that predictive performance should be evaluated together with quantum circuit complexity.
Nowadays, quantum-enhanced methods have been widely studied to solve machine learning related problems. This article presents the application of a Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) for binary classification. We utilized three datasets: a synthetic dataset with randomly generated values between 0 and 1, the publicly available University of California Intelligence Machine learning (UCI) sonar dataset consisting of mining data, and a proprietary diabetes dataset related to diabetes with acute diseases and diabetes without acute disease. To deal with the limitation of noisy intermediate-scale quantum systems (NISQ), we used a pre-processing method to enhance the prediction rate when applying the VQC method. The process includes feature selection and state preparation. Quantum state preparation is critical for obtaining a functioning pipeline in a quantum machine learning (QML) model. Amplitude encoding is a state preparation approach that enhances the performance of data encoding and the learning of quantum models. As a result, our proposed methods achieved accuracies of 75%, 71.4%, and 68.73% by using VQC model and in contrast, the amplitude encoding-based VQC achieved 98.40%, 67.3%, and 74.50% accuracies on the synthetic, sonar, and diabetes dataset, respectively.