Barry C. Sanders

Archismita Dalal, Mohsen Bagherimehrab, Barry C. Sanders

A popular machine-learning model for regression tasks, including stock-market prediction, weather forecasting and real-estate pricing, is the classical support vector regression (SVR). However, a practically realisable quantum SVR remains to be formulated. We devise annealing-based algorithms, namely simulated and quantum-classical hybrid, for training two SVR models and compare their empirical performances against the SVR implementation of Python's scikit-learn package for facial-landmark detection (FLD), a particular use case for SVR. Our method is to derive a quadratic-unconstrained-binary formulation for the optimisation problem used for training a SVR model and solve this problem using annealing. Using D-Wave's hybrid solver, we construct a quantum-assisted SVR model, thereby demonstrating a slight advantage over classical models regarding FLD accuracy. Furthermore, we observe that annealing-based SVR models predict landmarks with lower variances compared to the SVR models trained by gradient-based methods. Our work is a proof-of-concept example for applying quantum-assisted SVR to a supervised-learning task with a small training dataset.

Seyed Shakib Vedaie, Moslem Noori, Jaspreet S. Oberoi et al.

Kernel methods play an important role in machine learning applications due to their conceptual simplicity and superior performance on numerous machine learning tasks. Expressivity of a machine learning model, referring to the ability of the model to approximate complex functions, has a significant influence on its performance in these tasks. One approach to enhancing the expressivity of kernel machines is to combine multiple individual kernels to arrive at a more expressive combined kernel. This approach is referred to as multiple kernel learning (MKL). In this work, we propose an MKL method we refer to as quantum MKL, which combines multiple quantum kernels. Our method leverages the power of deterministic quantum computing with one qubit (DQC1) to estimate the combined kernel for a set of classically intractable individual quantum kernels. The combined kernel estimation is achieved without explicitly computing each individual kernel, while still allowing for the tuning of individual kernels in order to achieve better expressivity. Our simulations on two binary classification problems---one performed on a synthetic dataset and the other on a German credit dataset---demonstrate the superiority of the quantum MKL method over single quantum kernel machines.