Quantum vs. Classical Machine Learning: A Unified Empirical Comparison
For researchers evaluating quantum ML, this work provides a comprehensive empirical benchmark showing current limitations and potential niche advantages.
This paper empirically compares seven quantum machine learning models with their classical counterparts in supervised and reinforcement learning, finding that QML does not yet surpass classical baselines in prediction performance, policy stability, or training time, but shows promise for noise filtering and false positive control.
Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm for machine learning (ML), with the potential to offer computational advantages over classical approaches. At this stage, the evidence supporting the performance and advantages of quantum machine learning (QML) models relative to classical models is insufficient.To address this gap, this paper presents an empirical study on the performance of QML models and their classical counterparts. We compare seven model pairs spanning supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Our results indicate that the evaluated quantum machine learning models do not yet surpass the classical baselines in overall prediction performance, policy stability, or training time. Nevertheless, QML remains a promising approach for filtering noise and controlling false positives. Our research findings summarize the challenges facing quantum machine learning across hardware environments, training efficiency, and convergence stability, providing a foundation for research into the robustness and parameter optimization of QML. This work is publicly available at https://github.com/Z-537-437/QML.