Quantum algorithm for the nonlinear dimensionality reduction with arbitrary kernel

Abstract Dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques play an extremely critical role in the data mining and pattern recognition field. However, most DR approaches involve large-scale matrix computations, which cause too high running complexity to implement in the big data scenario efficiently. The recent developments in quantum information processing provide a novel path to alleviate this problem, where a potential quantum acceleration can be obtained comparing with the classical counterpart. Nevertheless, existing proposals for quantum DR methods faced the common dilemma of the nonlinear generalization owing to the intrinsic linear limitation of quantum computation. In this paper, an architecture to simulate the arbitrary nonlinear kernels on a universal quantum computer is illustrated and further propose the quantum kernel principal component analysis (QKPCA) algorithm. The key idea is employing the truncated Taylor expansion to approximate the arbitrary nonlinear kernel within the fixed error and then constructing the corresponding Hamiltonian simulation for the quantum phase estimation algorithm. It is demonstrated theoretically that the QKPCA is qualified for the nonlinear DR task while the exponential speedup is also maintained. In addition, this research has the potential ability to develop other quantum DR approaches and existing linear quantum machine learning models.