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Procedia Computer Science

Exploring Bagging Ensemble of Variational Quantum Classifiers with Out of Bag Weighting for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Abhikarsha Sil, Barkha Soni, Nilay Khare

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In recent years, quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as a promising approach for medical decision-making, with representative methods such as Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs), Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), and Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs). Among these, VQCs are distinguished by their expressive capability; however, their training on small biomedical datasets often results in instability and high variance. To address this issue, we propose a heterogeneous ensemble of six shallow VQCs evaluated on the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Diagnostic (WBCD) dataset, which contains 569 diagnostic samples characterized by 30 cytological features and binary class labels differentiating benign and malignant cases. The ensemble introduces diversity through distinct feature maps, circuit architectures, and optimization strategies, using rotation gates (RX, RY, RZ) combined with entangling layers (CNOT, CZ). Model reliability is estimated from out-of-bag errors, with normalized weights calculated as the inverse of the mean squared error, and final decisions obtained via weighted soft voting. The preprocessing pipeline involves median imputation and standardization, followed by principal component analysis (PCA) to compress the 30-dimensional space into three to four principal components for quantum encoding. In our experiments, individual VQCs trained on the full dataset exhibited unstable accuracies ranging from 80% to 96% across three–four qubits, whereas the proposed ensemble achieved consistent performance of 95.71% (3 qubits) and 96.43% (4 qubits), reducing variance and matching strong classical baselines such as SVM and Random Forest. All models were implemented in PennyLane, utilizing the Lightning.qubit simulator for shot-free optimization and the default.mixed device for noise-aware evaluation, demonstrating the potential of weighted quantum ensembles for reliable biomedical classification.

DOI
10.1016/j.procs.2026.06.261

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While quantum machine learning (QML) is a burgeoning field for solving intricate computational problems, its utility for actual medical diagnosis—where hardware is currently limited—is still being debated. This study explores the viability of a hybrid classical–quantum system for identifying breast masses via a Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC). Using a real-world breast cancer dataset, we established a binary task to separate benign from malignant cases. We handled clinical variables through standard encoding and normalization, then applied Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to compress the data into a format manageable for a low-qubit system. The quantum model, built on a parameterized variational circuit, was executed via a quantum simulator and benchmarked against a standard Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our findings show that the classical SVM outperformed the quantum approach (82.08% vs. 52.50%). However, the VQC still surpassed the threshold of random chance, even when restricted to only four qubits and minimal circuit depth.
Breast cancer is rated as one of the top leading diagnosed and deadliest cancers affecting women worldwide and causing high mortality rate among cancers. With the data-driven applications, hybrid quantum-classical machine learning models have evolved as significant alternatives for handling complex feature spaces with the growing interest in quantum computing. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of classical and quantum machine learning approaches for breast cancer classification using the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset. In this architecture we have preprocessed classical feature vectors using standard normalized techniques and parallelly quantum states are mapped through data embedding techniques which relies on parameterized rotational gates. In this work we have implemented all quantum models using the Pennylane library, resulting in hybrid quantum–classical optimization on near-term quantum simulators. The comparison results in multiple classical and quantum models. In classical we have Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which are compared with the quantum-based models such as the Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC), Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) and Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN). In QSVM, we have performed dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) before to quantum embedding, and quantum-generated features are used to train a classical linear SVM. The evaluation metrics results in accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, ROC curves and confusion matrices. The classical models achieves the accuracy in the range of 94%-96%, whereas competitive performance of quantum models demonstrate depending on the embedding strategy and circuit configuration. In the implemented quantum models, the variational quantum classifier achieved the highest classification accuracy of 96.06%, surpassing other evaluated models. These results demonstrate quantum embedding combined with variational quantum circuits can effectively capture discriminative patterns in medical datasets, indicating the implementation of quantum machine learning models for breast cancer diagnosis with the present quantum simulating platforms.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) offer a promising avenue for machine learning by leveraging quantum computation, but practical QNN models are constrained by the low dimensionality of the input data they can handle. This paper proposes a hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture that incorporates principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction and variational quantum circuits (VQC) for quantum feature encoding. Focusing on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer dataset (569 instances, 30 features) as a representative biomedical classification task, in this work, we design hybrid quantum-classical neural network (QNN) models using 5-qubit and 10-qubit quantum circuits. For comparison, we use classical baseline identical to the downstream head but without the VQC+measurement. The preprocessed inputs feed the classifier head directly; only the input layer dimension is adjusted to the number of features. The 5\mathbf{5}5-qubit hybrid model is evaluated under two conditions: with and without principal component analysis (PCA) applied as a preprocessing step to investigate the effect of dimensionality reduction on model performance. In contrast, the 10 -qubit hybrid model is evaluated without PCA, directly processing the input features to explore its capacity to handle higher-dimensional data within the quantum circuit. Performance is measured in terms of classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. We evaluate the model’s robustness by injecting noise into the training data, finding that the PCA-enhanced hybrid QNN maintains competitive accuracy and resilience under perturbation. This study highlights the potential of PCA-driven variational quantum encodings to enhance QNNs for reliable biomedical data classification.
Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer plays a critical role in improving patient survival rates and reducing treatment costs. Classical machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have demonstrated strong performance in medical diagnosis tasks; however, their scalability and representational limits motivate the exploration of emerging paradigms. Quantum Machine Learning (QML), particularly Variational Quantum Classifiers (VQC), has recently gained attention due to its potential to model complex decision boundaries using quantum circuits. This paper presents a comparative analysis between a Variational Quantum Classifier and classical machine learning models for binary breast cancer classification. The study employs dimensionality-reduced clinical data and evaluates model performance using accuracy, confusion matrices, decision boundary visualization, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves. Experimental results indicate that the VQC achieves competitive performance with classical approaches, demonstrating its feasibility for small-scale medical datasets and highlighting the promise of quantum-enhanced learning in healthcare applications.
Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs) have recently emerged as a promising approach for biomedical classification tasks. However, their practical deployment remains constrained by limited qubit availability and sensitivity to high-dimensional feature spaces. This study proposes a hybrid framework integrating Pearson correlation–based feature selection and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with QSVM for breast cancer diagnosis. First, Pearson correlation analysis is employed to remove redundant and weakly relevant features. Subsequently, PCA projects the selected attributes into a compact subspace while preserving most of the original data variance. This dimensionality reduction strategy decreases the number of qubits required for quantum encoding and improves computational efficiency. Experiments conducted on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset demonstrate that the proposed hybrid QSVM achieves 98% classification accuracy, outperforming or matching existing classical and quantum-based approaches. The results confirm that combining classical preprocessing techniques with quantum classifiers provides a robust and resource-efficient solution for biomedical data analysis.
Introduction: In recent years, high-dimensional clinical and genomic data have gained significant importance for prognosis and personalized medicine in breast cancer. But the use of quantum machine learning (QML) on such data is limited by the availability of few qubits, the computation time of quantum simulation, and dimensionality reduction. This work systematically compares several QML architectures for breast cancer classification in the presence of realistic and simulator constraints. Methods: The experiments were performed on a dataset of METABRIC breast cancer patients (2,509 patients). After handling missing values and one-hot encoding, there were 63 features in the processed data set. The feature space was reduced by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to 12, 4 and 2 components for the implementations of quantum computers, respectively, with 56.10 ± 0.14%, 26.78 ± 0.57% and 16.23 ± 0.33% of the variance retained. Three QML models were tested: Quantum Neural Networks (QNN), Quantum K-Nearest Neighbors (QKNN), and Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM), with the models being simulated. Seven classical classification models were tested: Logistic Regression, SVM with RBF kernel, K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM and Multilayer Perceptron, both with PCA-matched and full 63-feature representation. All primary results are reported with 5-fold cross validation. Results: Among the evaluated QML architectures, QKNN using 12 principal components achieved the strongest performance, attaining an accuracy of **75.11% ± 3.76%**, an F1-score of **0.7088 ± 0.0433**, and a ROC-AUC of **0.8148 ± 0.0394**. Even though all of the QML models performed significantly poorly in comparison to classical models trained on the entire 63-feature data set, the latter models were able to achieve about **94% accuracy** with XGBoost, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression. The comparison also showed the effect of information loss due to PCA is significant in predictive performance in both classical and quantum models. Discussion: The results show that for high dimensional breast cancer data, currently available simulator-based QML models can learn meaningful patterns with limited quantum resources, but are not as effective as powerful classical machine learning models when complete feature representations are available. The study does not report any sort of quantum advantage or clinical use, but rather a benchmark of current QML architectures that has been rigorously calculated and repeated, with a focus on the impact of dimensionality reduction, validation approaches, and simulator limitations, as well as outlining challenges that need to be overcome prior to practical implementation on real quantum hardware.