Empirical Analysis of a Quantum Classifier Implemented on IBM’s 5Q Quantum Computer

The development of artificial intelligence today is marked with increased computational power, new algorithms, and big data. One such milestone impressive achievement in this area is Google’s AlphaGo. However, this advancement is beginning to face increasing challenges and the major bottleneck of AI today is the lack of adequate computing power in the processing of big data. Quantum computing offers a new and viable solution to deal with these challenges. A recent work designed a quantum classifier that runs on IBM’s five qubit quantum computer and tested its performance on the Iris data set as well as a circles data set. As quantum machine learning is still an emerging discipline, it may be enlightening to conduct an empirical analysis of this quantum classifier on some artificial datasets to help learn its unique features and potentials. Our work on the quantum classifier can be summarized in three parts. The first is to run its original version as a binary classifier on some artificial datasets using visualization to reveal the quantum nature of this algorithm, and the second is to analyze the swap operation utilized in its original circuit due to the hardware constraint and investigate its impact on the performance of the classifier. The last part is to extend the original circuit for binary classification to a circuit for multiclass classification and test its performance. Our findings shed new light on how this quantum classifier works.