Quantum Algorithms for Nearest-Neighbor Methods for Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Nathan Wiebe, Ashish Kapoor, Krysta Svore

Published 2014-01-09, updated 2014-07-18Version 2

We present several quantum algorithms for performing nearest-neighbor learning. At the core of our algorithms are fast and coherent quantum methods for computing distance metrics such as the inner product and Euclidean distance. We prove upper bounds on the number of queries to the input data required to compute these metrics. In the worst case, our quantum algorithms lead to polynomial reductions in query complexity relative to the corresponding classical algorithm. In certain cases, we show exponential or even super-exponential reductions over the classical analog. We study the performance of our quantum nearest-neighbor algorithms on several real-world binary classification tasks and find that the classification accuracy is competitive with classical methods.