Physics-Based versus Data-Driven Classification of Single-Photon Quantum Emitters from Sparse Autocorrelation Data
Identifying single photon emitters from large, inhomogeneous candidate populations is key to realizing many quantum applications. This requires measuring the emitters second order autocorrelation function, whose statistical reliability is fundamentally limited by acquisition time. Machine learning classifiers can accelerate identification from sparse data, but their performance relative to physics-based inference has not been systematically examined. Here, we introduce sequential Bayesian inference for single photon emitter classification and benchmark it against Levenberg-Marquardt fitting and a feedforward neural network. We use synthetic training and test data calibrated against real Hanbury Brown-Twiss measurements from hexagonal boron nitride emitters, enabling evaluation against an exactly known ground-truth emitter number under realistic noise and background conditions. All three approaches achieve high, near-perfect accuracy with sufficient integration time, but differ greatly in convergence rate and robustness under sparse photon statistics. The neural network is most robust at short integration times. The Bayesian classifier reaches near-perfect accuracy fastest, while retaining full physical interpretability. Levenberg-Marquardt fitting remains a valuable, fully interpretable method, achieving the highest recall despite being the slowest to converge. These results lead to several key conclusions. No single method dominates across all performance metrics. Relying on any one metric alone can give a misleading picture of classifier performance, particularly under sparse photon statistics. Physics-based and data-driven methods are complementary rather than competing approaches. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for selecting and combining classification strategies for scalable single-photon-source screening and other quantum-emitter characterization tasks.