A study and analysis of a discrete quantum walk-based hybrid clustering approach using d-regular bipartite graph and 1D lattice

Traditional machine learning shares several benefits with quantum information processing field. The study of machine learning with quantum mechanics is called quantum machine learning. Data clustering is an important tool for machine learning where quantum computing plays a vital role in its inherent speed up capability. In this paper, a hybrid quantum algorithm for data clustering (quantum walk-based hybrid clustering (QWBHC)) is introduced where one-dimensional discrete time quantum walks (DTQW) play the central role to update the positions of data points according to their probability distributions. A quantum oracle is also designed and it is mainly implemented on a finite [Formula: see text]-regular bipartite graph where data points are initially distributed as a predefined set of clusters. An overview of a quantum walk (QW) based clustering algorithm on 1D lattice structure is also introduced and described in this paper. In order to search the nearest neighbors, a unitary and reversible DTQW gives a quadratic speed up over the traditional classical random walk. This paper also demonstrates the comparisons of our proposed hybrid quantum clustering algorithm with some state-of-the-art clustering algorithms in terms of clustering accuracy and time complexity analysis. The proposed quantum oracle needs [Formula: see text] queries to mark the nearest data points among clusters and modify the existing clusters. Finally, the proposed QWBHC algorithm achieves [Formula: see text] performance.