Learning quantum models from quantum or classical data

TL;DR

This paper explores how to represent classical data distributions using quantum models by learning Hamiltonians, demonstrating that quantum approaches can outperform classical methods in accuracy and reveal quantum correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum learning formalism for classical data, showing how to infer Hamiltonians and utilize quantum statistics to improve data modeling and classification.

Findings

Quantum learning yields more accurate results than classical maximum likelihood.

Quantum mutual information indicates entanglement in data representations.

Remaining mutual information may be harnessed via non-orthogonal measurements for enhanced performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem how to represent a classical data distribution in a quantum system. The proposed method is to learn quantum Hamiltonian that is such that its ground state approximates the given classical distribution. We review previous work on the quantum Boltzmann machine (QBM) and how it can be used to infer quantum Hamiltonians from quantum statistics. We then show how the proposed quantum learning formalism can also be applied to a purely classical data analysis. Representing the data as a rank one density matrix introduces quantum statistics for classical data in addition to the classical statistics. We show that quantum learning yields results that can be significantly more accurate than the classical maximum likelihood approach, both for unsupervised learning and for classification. The data density matrix and the QBM solution show entanglement, quantified by the quantum mutual information $I$. The classical mutual information in the data $I_c\le I/2=C$, with $C$ maximal classical correlations obtained by choosing a suitable orthogonal measurement basis. We suggest that the remaining mutual information $Q=I/2$ is obtained by non orthogonal measurements that may violate the Bell inequality. The excess mutual information $I-I_c$ may potentially be used to improve the performance of quantum implementations of machine learning or other statistical methods.