Paper detail

Small quantum computers and large classical data sets

We introduce hybrid classical-quantum algorithms for problems involving a large classical data set X and a space of models Y such that a quantum computer has superposition access to Y but not X. These algorithms use data reduction techniques to construct a weighted subset of X called a coreset that yields approximately the same loss for each model. The coreset can be constructed by the classical computer alone, or via an interactive protocol in which the outputs of the quantum computer are used to help decide which elements of X to use. By using the quantum computer to perform Grover search or rejection sampling, this yields quantum speedups for maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian inference and saddle-point optimization. Concrete applications include k-means clustering, logistical regression, zero-sum games and boosting.