Quantum Machine Learning—Quo Vadis?

The book <i>Quantum Machine Learning: What Quantum Computing Means to Data Mining</i>, by Peter Wittek, made quantum machine learning popular to a wider audience. The promise of quantum machine learning for big data is that it will lead to new applications due to the exponential speed-up and the possibility of compressed data representation. However, can we really apply quantum machine learning for real-world applications? What are the advantages of quantum machine learning algorithms in addition to some proposed artificial problems? Is the promised exponential or quadratic speed-up realistic, assuming that real quantum computers exist? Quantum machine learning is based on statistical machine learning. We cannot port the classical algorithms directly into quantum algorithms due to quantum physical constraints, like the input-output problem or the normalized representation of vectors. Theoretical speed-ups of quantum machine learning are usually analyzed in the literature by ignoring the input destruction problem, which is the main bottleneck for data encoding. The dilemma results from the following question: should we ignore or marginalize those constraints or not?