Robust evaluation of classical and quantum machine learning under noise, imbalance, feature reduction and explainability

Quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex classification problems by leveraging the computational advantages of quantum systems. While most traditional machine learning models focus on clean, balanced datasets, real-world data is often noisy, imbalanced and high-dimensional, posing significant challenges for scalability and generalisation. This paper conducts an extensive experimental evaluation of five supervised classifiers- Decision Tree, K nearest neighbour, Random Forest, linear regression and support vector machines in comparison with Quantum machine learning classifiers- quantum Support vector machine, quantum k- nearest neighbor and variational quantum classifier-across five diverse datasets, including iris, wine quality, Breast cancer, UCI human activity recognition, and Pima diabetes. To simulate real-world challenges, we introduce class imbalance using SMOTE and ADASYN Sampling, inject Gaussian noise into the features, and assess the impact of dimensionality reduction through ANOVA-based feature selection. Additionally, we utilise explainable AI tools, such as SHAP and LIME, to interpret model decisions. Our results demonstrate that Logistic Regression consistently performs well under various complexities, while Quantum Support Vector Machines show resilience to feature noise and class imbalance. The study also highlights the current capabilities and limitations of QML models, offering valuable insights into building generalisable and interpretable ML systems for deployment in complex environments. These insights are crucial for building robust, interpretable, and generalisable ML models for practical deployment.