Digital Quantum Reservoir Computing for ATM Time Series Prediction
This work provides an empirical assessment of digital QRC for realistic financial forecasting, highlighting its current limitations and potential on near-term quantum hardware.
The paper investigates digital quantum reservoir computing for multi-step ATM cash demand forecasting, finding that while QRC models do not outperform the classical Prophet benchmark in MAE and NMSE, they achieve competitive results in Dynamic Time Warping, indicating partial ability to capture temporal structure.
We investigate a digital quantum reservoir computing (QRC) framework for multi-step forecasting of automated teller machine (ATM) cash demand time series on near-term quantum devices. The proposed approach uses parametrized four-qubit reservoirs with a fixed structure exploiting partial measurement and reset, where temporal data is encoded in rotation angles. Training is restricted to a classical Ridge-regression readout. We systematically analyze the impact of the circuit ansatzë, reservoir memory, measurement-derived observables, and the execution backend on the forecasting performance. Experiments are performed with noiseless simulation, noise-aware emulation, and a real IQM Spark quantum processor. Although the QRC models do not outperform the classical Prophet benchmark in terms of Mean Absolute Error and Normalized Mean Squared Error metrics, they achieve more competitive results in Dynamic Time Warping metric, indicating a partial ability to capture temporal structure. These findings provide an empirical assessment of digital QRC for realistic financial forecasting and highlight both its current limitations and its potential on near-term quantum hardware.