Quantum phase estimation based algorithms for machine learning

Quantum computing is certainly one of the greatest advances in the computer science field. Thanks to the parallelism and entanglement properties, it has proved to offer several advantages compared to the classical algorithms especially in the great reduction of the processing time. Quantum phase estimation (QPE) is one of the most important algorithms for quantum computing. It is known as the eigenvalue finding module for unitary operators. The Fourier transform is the key to this procedure. It has been researched and used to solve many problems such as the order finding problem, and the factoring problem. It was also applied for quantum sampling algorithms and the calculation of the eigenvalues of unitary matrices. In this paper, we study three important quantum algorithms for machine learning that use the QPE algorithm as a subroutine: the quantum principal components analysis (PCA) for data visualization, the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm for solving linear systems, and the quantum singular value thresholding (SVT) for matrix completion in recommender systems. We also discuss the advantages and limits of such algorithms compared to their classical versions. Then we discuss potential ways of amelioration of such algorithms, and end with a proposed approach for further improvement.