Diabetes Prediction Using Quantum Neurons with Preprocessing Based on Hypercomplex Numbers

The use of properties that are intrinsic to quantum mechanics has made it possible to build quantum algorithms with greater efficiency than classical algorithms to solve problems whose classically efficient solution either does not exist or is not known. There are quantum neurons that can carry an exponential amount of information to a linear number of quantum information units (qubits) using the quantum property of superposition. In this paper, we compare the performance of three of these quantum neuron models applied to the diabetes classification problem. We also propose the use of different data preprocessing strategies. Quantum neurons were simulated using the IBM Qiskit tool. We compare the preprocessing approaches applied to two toy problems (1) simulating the XOR operator and (2) solving a generic nonlinear problem. The results of the experiments shows that a single quantum neuron is capable of achieving an accuracy rate of 100% in the XOR problem and an accuracy rate of 100% in a non-linear dataset, demonstrating that the quantum neurons with real weights are capable of modeling non-linearly separable problems. In the problem of diagnosing diabetes, quantum neurons achieved an accuracy rate of 76% and AUC-ROC of 88%, while its classic version, the perceptron, reached only 63% accuracy and the artificial neural network reached 80% AUC-ROC. These results indicate that a single quantum neuron performs better than its classical version and even the artificial neural network for AUC-ROC, demonstrating potential for use in healthcare applications in the near future.