Abstract Topological Data Analysis methods can be useful for classification and clustering
tasks in many different fields as they can provide two dimensional persistence dia-
grams that summarize important information about the shape of potentially complex
and high dimensional data sets. The space of persistence diagrams can be endowed
with various metrics, which admit a statistical structure and allow to use these summaries for machine learning algorithms, e.g. the Wasserstein distance.

However, computing the distance between two persistence diagrams involves finding an opti-
mal way to match the points of the two diagrams and may not always be an easy
task for classical computers. Recently, quantum algorithms have shown the po-
tential to speedup the process of obtaining the persistence information displayed on
persistence diagrams by estimating the spectra of persistent Dirac operators. So,
in this work we explore the potential of quantum computers to estimate the distance
between persistence diagrams as the next step in the design of a fully quantum frame-
work for TDA. In particular we propose variational quantum algorithms for the
Wasserstein distance as well as the dcp distance. Our implementation is a weighted
version of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm that relies on control
clauses to encode the constraints of the optimization problem.
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