Hybrid Quantum-Classical Logistic Regression for Calibrated Classification of Pulsar Candidates

Abstract

Reliable pulsar candidate ranking requires probability estimates that are not only discriminative but also well calibrated. We evaluate hybrid quantum-calssical logistic regression on the imbalanced HTRU-2 dataset using three quantum feature encodings: angle encoding, amplitude encoding, and data re-uploading. The models are trained using analytic gradients and compared with classical baselines and a quantum support vector machine reference model under a paired-seed protocol. Evaluation combines rare-event discrimination, low-false-positive-rate recovery, probability calibration, and runtime analysis. Angle encoding gives the strongest performance among the quantum logistic regression variants. At shallow depth, the angle-encoded model remains close to the best classical baselines in discrimination and low-false-positive-rate recovery, while also giving the lowest calibration error at the benchmark configuration. Murphy decomposition shows that the angle-encoded model maintains low reliability error and high, stable resolution across circuit depths and training-set sizes. This means that its probability estimates preserve both calibration and meaningful separation between candidate groups. Data re-uploading is competitive at small depth but loses discrimination and resolution at larger depth in the present multi-qubit implementation, while amplitude encoding remains weaker across dataset sizes. Shallow angle-encoded quantum logistic regression therefore gives the best balance among the tested quantum logistic models, although simulation runtime remains a practical limitation.