Pulsar classification: comparing quantum convolutional neural networks and quantum support vector machines

Abstract Well-known quantum machine learning techniques, specifically quantum kernel-assisted support vector machines (QSVMs) and quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs), are applied to the binary classification of pulsars. In this comparative study, it is illustrated with simulations that both quantum methods successfully achieve effective classification of the HTRU-2 data set that connects pulsar class labels to eight separate features. While QCNNs are superior in terms of training and prediction speed compared to QSVMs, the preference shifts toward QSVMs when the present noisy NISQ-era devices are incorporated into the comparison. QSVMs demonstrate superior overall performance compared to QCNNs when assessed using binary classification performance metrics. Classical methods are implemented to serve as a benchmark for comparison with the quantum approaches.