Quantum-Inspired Exponential Hilbert Space Feature Embedding with Layered Encoding-Entangling Circuit Architectures for Superior Quantum-Classical Hybrid Performance in Severely Imbalanced Credit Card Fraud Classification
Orbe, Nabil, Kowsar, Jia, Mohammad, Masum, Islam, Md, Mohaiminul, Ángel Rodríguez Sánchez, Miguel, Professor
Abstract
Credit card fraud detection is still one of the significant challenges in the digital economy, and most traditional machine learning methods appear to be inadequate fordealing with highly imbalanced datasets and intricate non-linear fraud patterns. This paper introduces and tests Q-fusion enhanced hybrid models, which exploit Quantum-Inspired FeatureMaps to embed classical transaction data in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces with the aim of increasing class distinguishability and performance. Five quantum-boosting classifiers were performed includingand described: Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), Quantum Logistic Regression (QLR), Quantum K-Nearest Neighbors (QKNN), Quantum Gaussian Naive Bayes (QGNB) and Quantum Multi-Layer Perceptron (QMLP). The results show that the Quantum MLP model provided the best performance and reached an accuracy of 99.35%, precision of 0.96, recall of0.92, F1-score of 0.94 and ROC-AUC score of 0.97 which outperformed all quantum-enhanced models as well as classical ANN model.. Quantum feature mapping greatly improved feature separability, especially for minority class fraudulent transactionsand remained compatible with classical infrastructure. These results identify quantum-inspired machine learning as a promising route for enhancing fraud detection in severely imbalanced data sets and can berealized without deploying full-scale quantum hardware. implementation faces hardware limitations ( 27), algorithmic complexity (28), and infrastructure integration challenges (29). Quantum-inspired approaches provide a pragmatic pathway, offering quantum-like advantages through classical simulation (30; 31). Research Problem and Contribution Credit card fraud detection faces interconnected challenges: (1) extreme class imbalance creates severe classifier bias where models achieve high accuracy by predicting all transactions as legitimate while missing fraud (32; 33); (2) feature engineering requires domain expertise to identify transaction attributes, temporal patterns, and behavioral anomalies (14; 34); (3) real-world systems require millisecond classification (35); (4) regulatory compliance demands transparent, explainable systems (36; 37). Despite growing QML interest, empirical evaluations for fraud detection remain limited. Most studies focus either on purely classical methods (8; 32) or theoretical quantum algorithms requiring full hardware (30; 38), creating a gap in practical quantum-inspired implementations. Recent surveys identify this as a critical frontier (26; 39; 40). This research contributions: (1) Implementation and evaluation of five quantum-enhanced hybrid models (QSVM, QLR, QKNN, QGNB, QMLP); (2) Demonstration that quantum-inspired transformations project data into higher-dimensional Hilbert spaces, improving fraud class separability; (3) Empirical evidence of substantial gains (99.35% accuracy, 0.97 ROC-AUC) on classical hardware; (4) Rigorous comparative evaluation with consistent preprocessing and comprehensive metrics; (5) Identification that Quantum MLP achieves synergistic performance combining quantum features with deep learning. Research Objectives This research aims to: (1) develop quantum-inspired feature mapping transforming transaction data into Hilbert space representations; (2) design and evaluate five quantum-enhanced classifiers; (3) conduct comprehensive performance evaluation using imbalanced classification metrics; (4) quantify performance improvements from quantum-inspired transformations; (5) assess computational feasibility for production deployment; (6) provide theoretical explanations based on Hilbert space geometry. Paper Organization Section 2 reviews related work in machine learning fraud detection, quantum computing, and quantum machine learning. Section 3 describes methodology including preprocessing, quantum feature mapping, classifier architectures, and evaluation metrics. Section 4 presents experimental results with performance analysis. Section 5 concludes with key findings and future directions. 2 Related Work 2.1 Classical Machine Learning for Fraud Detection Credit card fraud detection has been extensively studied using classical approaches. Early work established cost-sensitive learning to address class imbalance (41). Logistic Regression provides interpretability and probabilistic outputs (3) but struggles with nonlinear patterns (7). Support Vector Machines identify maximum-margin hyperplanes (5) but face computational challenges (O(n 2 )-O(n 3 )) (42) and performance degradation on imbalanced data (8). Ensemble methods including Random Forest (4) and Gradient Boosting (43; 44) achieve improved stability. Deep learning approaches-Multi-Layer Perceptrons with modern optimization (ReLU (45), batch normalization (46), dropout (47), Adam (48))-achieve state-of-the-art performance with preprocessing (49). Recurrent architectures (LSTM (50), GRU (51)) capture temporal patterns (52), while Autoencoders frame fraud as anomaly detection (53; 54). Imbalance Handling Techniques Class imbalance (¡0.2% fraud) (13) necessitates specialized techniques. SMOTE generates synthetic minority samples through interpolation (6), while SMOTEENN combines SMOTE with Edited Nearest Neighbors for noise reduction (55; 56). Cost-sensitive learning assigns different misclassification penalties (33; 57). Ensemble methods train multiple classifiers on balanced subsets (58; 59).