Quantum unsupervised and supervised learning on superconducting processors

Machine learning algorithms perform well on identifying patterns in many different datasets due to their versatility. However, as one increases the size of the data, the computation time for training and using these statistical models grows quickly. Here, we propose and implement on the IBMQ a quantum analogue to K-means clustering, and compare it to a previously developed quantum support vector machine. We find the algorithm’s accuracy comparable to the classical K-means algorithm for clustering and classification problems, and find that it becomes less computationally expensive to implement for large datasets as compared to its classical counterpart.