From Theory to Practice: Quantum Kernels in Support Vector Classification for Improved Performance

Quantum computing offers a powerful new paradigm for enhancing classical machine learning, particularly in classification tasks. In this paper, we examine the use of quantum kernels within Support Vector Classification (SVC) and compare their performance to classical SVC. Our experiments focus on the Iris and Wine datasets. For the Wine dataset, we applied Principal Component Analysis (PCA), reducing the feature space from 13 to 4 dimensions to improve computational efficiency. The results demonstrate that Quantum-enhanced SVC (QSVC) outperforms classical SVC, achieving an accuracy improvement from 96.15% with classical SVM to 98.05% with QSVC for the Wine dataset. Similarly, for the Iris dataset, classical SVC achieves near-perfect accuracy at 100%, while QSVC closely follows with 97.25% accuracy. These results highlight the capability of quantum kernels to improve both accuracy and efficiency in classification tasks, providing a promising direction for scalable quantum-classical hybrid systems in machine learning.