Benchmarking Quantum Feature Encoding Strategies for Binary Classification with QSVM

Abstract

The way in which classical data are encoded into quantum states plays a significant role in both classification performance and quantum circuit complexity in Quantum Machine Learning. In this study, the effects of different quantum feature encoding strategies on Quantum Support Vector Machine performance were investigated using five binary classification datasets. In particular, the statistical relationships between features were incorporated into quantum circuits through \(RY(\theta)\) and controlled-\(RY(\theta)\) gates, and this approach was compared with conventional quantum feature maps. The results demonstrate that incorporating statistical relationships into the encoding process can influence classification performance. However, more complex and densely entangled circuits do not necessarily yield higher performance. In addition, a composite evaluation metric was employed to jointly assess predictive performance, generalization, and circuit cost. The findings across the five datasets indicate that the choice of quantum feature encoding strategy should account for the underlying structure of the data and that predictive performance should be evaluated together with quantum circuit complexity.