Quantum support vector machines for classification and regression on a trapped-ion quantum computer

Abstract Quantum machine learning is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. In this work, we examine our quantum machine learning models, which are based on quantum support vector classification (QSVC) and quantum support vector regression (QSVR). We investigate these models using a quantum-circuit simulator, both with and without noise, as well as the IonQ Harmony quantum processor. For the QSVC tasks, we use a dataset containing fraudulent credit card transactions and image datasets (the MNIST and the Fashion-MNIST datasets); for the QSVR tasks, we use a financial dataset and a materials dataset. For the classification tasks, the performance of our QSVC models using 4 qubits of the trapped-ion quantum computer was comparable to that obtained from noiseless quantum-circuit simulations. The result is consistent with the analysis of our device-noise simulations with varying qubit-gate error rates. For the regression tasks, applying a low-rank approximation to the noisy quantum kernel, in combination with hyperparameter tuning in ε-SVR, improved the performance of the QSVR models on the near-term quantum device. Our results suggest that the quantum kernel, as described by our shallow quantum circuit, can be effectively used for both QSVC and QSVR tasks, indicating its resistance to noise and its adaptability to various datasets.