quantum-ml-comparator

Developed at Orbion GmbH.

Compare quantum machine learning algorithms against classical ML — with automatic QML recommendations.

A general-purpose open-source framework to benchmark QML vs classical ML on your own datasets. Tell it what classical algorithm you're using and it recommends which quantum algorithms to compare against, explains why, and runs the comparison for you.

Install

pip install quantum-ml-comparator

Optional extras:

pip install "quantum-ml-comparator[molecules]"  # adds pyscf for VQE demos
pip install "quantum-ml-comparator[dev]"        # pytest, ruff, mypy

Python ≥ 3.9. Supported backends: PennyLane's default.qubit (CPU) out of the box; lightning.qubit if you install pennylane-lightning.

Quickstart

from qmc import Benchmark

bench = Benchmark(dataset="iris", classical_methods=["MLP", "SVM", "RF"])
bench.run()
bench.report("results/")

Quantum methods are auto-recommended based on your classical methods — see the mappings table below.

scikit-learn compatible estimators

VQCClassifier and QuantumKernelClassifier satisfy the BaseEstimator + ClassifierMixin contract, so they drop into any existing sklearn pipeline:

from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score
from qmc import VQCClassifier

pipe = Pipeline([
    ("scaler", StandardScaler()),
    ("vqc", VQCClassifier(n_qubits=4, n_layers=2, epochs=20)),
])
scores = cross_val_score(pipe, X, y, cv=5)

Persistence: use joblib or cloudpickle (stdlib pickle doesn't handle PennyLane QNode closures).

QML algorithm recommender

Don't know which quantum algorithm to try? Ask:

from qmc import print_recommendations

print_recommendations("RandomForest")

Output:

[PRIMARY] Quantum Kernel Ensemble  (difficulty: medium)
  Ensemble of quantum-kernel SVMs on bootstrap samples, mimicking Random Forest's bagging.
  Rationale: Combining multiple quantum kernel models reduces variance, similar to how
             Random Forest aggregates decision trees.
  Circuit:   8 qubits, 4 layers

[SECONDARY] VQC  (difficulty: easy)
  Variational Quantum Classifier as a single strong learner replacing the tree ensemble.
  Rationale: A sufficiently expressive VQC can match an ensemble of weak learners.

Supported classical algorithms: SVM, MLP, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, k-NN, XGBoost, Naive Bayes, PCA. Anything else falls back to the general-purpose VQC / Quantum Kernel recommendations.

What's included

Classical baselines

MLP (PyTorch), SVM, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, k-NN, Gradient Boosting, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree.

Quantum circuits

• VQC — Variational Quantum Classifier (binary + multiclass)
• Quantum kernel — IQP-style feature map + precomputed SVM
• QNP ansatz — particle-number-preserving gates (Anselmetti et al.)
• HEA ansatz — StronglyEntanglingLayers (generic)
• Plus factory helpers for custom circuits in qmc.circuits.templates

Molecular VQE

Run VQE on standard benchmark molecules (H₂, HeH⁺, LiH, H₂O) with the QNP or HEA ansatz. The H₂ reproduction of Anselmetti et al. (2021) ships as an executable script:

python examples/reproduce_anselmetti_h2.py
# VQE matches FCI to < 1 mHa across the full dissociation curve

Protein–ligand binding benchmark (BioLiP sample, 220k residues)

A 3 MB feature parquet shipped under benchmarks/ lets anyone reproduce the published +55.6 % F1 lift at 5,000 training samples measurement in about three minutes:

python examples/05_protein_ligand_binding.py
# ...
#    n_train   classical F1   classical + quantum      lift
#      5,000         0.1053                0.1639    +55.6%

See benchmarks/README.md for provenance, license, and the full column schema.

FeatureChannelBenchmark — same method, different feature channels

Use FeatureChannelBenchmark when the question is "does adding this feature channel help the model?" rather than "which model wins on this dataset?". It reuses one estimator across several feature sets on the same labels, with an optional learning-curve sweep.

from qmc import FeatureChannelBenchmark
from qmc.classical.models import get_random_forest

bench = FeatureChannelBenchmark(
    channels={
        "classical only":      (X_train_cls, X_test_cls),
        "classical + quantum": (X_train_all, X_test_all),
    },
    y_train=y_train,
    y_test=y_test,
    estimator_factory=lambda: get_random_forest(n_estimators=100, seed=42),
    training_sizes=[100, 500, 1_000, 5_000, 10_000, 50_000],
    seed=42,
)
bench.run()
print(bench.to_dataframe())   # long-form DataFrame with per-channel lifts
print(bench.summary())

Pass any scalar-returning scorer(y_true, y_pred) to override the default (binary F1 on the positive class). See examples/05_protein_ligand_binding.py for a full worked example against the shipped BioLiP sample.

Live dashboard

from qmc.dashboard import start_dashboard
start_dashboard(port=8501)
# Open http://localhost:8501 for live training curves during bench.run()

Bring your own data

import numpy as np
from qmc import Benchmark

X = np.random.randn(500, 6)
y = (X[:, 0] * X[:, 1] > 0).astype(int)

bench = Benchmark(dataset=(X, y), classical_methods=["RF", "MLP"])
bench.run()

Or from a CSV:

bench = Benchmark(dataset="data.csv", target_column="label")

Built-in datasets: iris, breast_cancer, wine, digits, moons, circles, blobs.

Example output

Running examples/01_quickstart.py on Iris:

Rank	Method	Type	Accuracy	F1	Time
1	VQC	quantum	1.0000	1.0000	340.7s
2	QuantumKernel	quantum	0.9556	0.9554	7.8s
3	MLP	classical	0.9333	0.9333	0.06s
4	SVM	classical	0.9111	0.9107	0.001s
5	RF	classical	0.8889	0.8878	0.03s

Examples

• examples/01_quickstart.py — classical vs quantum on Iris
• examples/02_recommender.py — get QML recommendations
• examples/03_molecule_vqe.py — VQE on H₂ (requires PySCF)
• examples/04_custom_dataset.py — bring your own numpy data
• examples/reproduce_anselmetti_h2.py — full H₂ VQE reproduction with sanity-gate assertions

Mapping reference

Your classical algorithm	Recommended quantum counterpart
SVM	Quantum Kernel SVM, VQC
MLP / Neural Net	VQC, Data Re-uploading VQC
Random Forest	Quantum Kernel Ensemble, VQC
Logistic Regression	Quantum Kernel + Linear SVM
k-NN	Quantum Kernel k-NN
XGBoost	Quantum Kernel SVM, Quantum Boosted Ensemble
Naive Bayes	VQC with probabilistic readout
PCA	Quantum feature map, Quantum Autoencoder
anything else	VQC, Quantum Kernel (general-purpose)

Development

git clone https://github.com/orbion-life/quantum-ml-comparator.git
cd quantum-ml-comparator
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev workflow, code standards, and how to add a new QML algorithm or dataset. Bug reports and security issues: SECURITY.md.

Citation

If you use this package in your work, please cite it:

@software{quantum_ml_comparator,
  author  = {Goteti, Aniruddh},
  title   = {quantum-ml-comparator: quantum vs classical ML benchmarking with automatic algorithm recommendations},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/orbion-life/quantum-ml-comparator},
  version = {0.2.1},
  organization = {Orbion GmbH}
}

GitHub also exposes a "Cite this repository" button (powered by CITATION.cff).

License

MIT. Use it anywhere.

Acknowledgments

This repository was developed with AI coding assistance. The research direction, experimental design, verification, and technical decisions are original work; the code scaffolding was accelerated with Claude.

QNP gate implementation based on Anselmetti et al. (2021). Built on PennyLane and scikit-learn.