Quantum-Inspired Support Vector Machine

Support vector machine (SVM) is a particularly powerful and flexible supervised learning model that analyzes data for both classification and regression, whose usual algorithm complexity scales polynomially with the dimension of data space and the number of data points. To tackle the big data challenge, a quantum SVM algorithm was proposed, which is claimed to achieve exponential speedup for least squares SVM (LS-SVM). Here, inspired by the quantum SVM algorithm, we present a quantum-inspired classical algorithm for LS-SVM. In our approach, an improved fast sampling technique, namely indirect sampling, is proposed for sampling the kernel matrix and classifying. We first consider the LS-SVM with a linear kernel, and then discuss the generalization of our method to nonlinear kernels. Theoretical analysis shows our algorithm can make classification with arbitrary success probability in logarithmic runtime of both the dimension of data space and the number of data points for low rank, low condition number, and high dimensional data matrix, matching the runtime of the quantum SVM.