Optimizing a Variational Quantum Classifier through the Behavior Analysis of its Components

Abstract

Quantum computer introduces a novel approach to process information. In quantum information processing, the law of quantum mechanics is applied to solve many practical computational problems. Classification is one such problem that can be resolved efficiently with the gate model quantum computer. There are several types of classifiers available in quantum domain, such as- variational quantum classifier (VQC), Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) with Kernel Approximation, Hybrid Quantum Neural Network (QNN) etc. However, in this study, the mathematical similarities between VQC and classical support vector machine (SVM) and the components of the VQC are analyzed to optimize the performance of the classifier. For the convenience of the study, publicly available datasets, such as- IRIS dataset and Breast cancer dataset, are used in the experiments. IRIS dataset is brought into play for the testing and breast cancer dataset dimension reduced by Principle component analysis (PCA) is for validity test of the optimized VQC. After studying the VQC components in detail, it is found that the optimized VQC outperforms some of the classical machine learning algorithms or sometimes works as similar as classical SVM. The optimized VQC algorithm classifies IRIS dataset with 100% of accuracy and PCA dimension reduced Breast cancer dataset with 90% of accuracy. All of these studies are conducted with the help of Qiskit- an open-source software development kit (SKD) which is developed by IBM. So, the quantum device is considered to be ideal in every experiment.