Evolutionary quantum feature selection

Abstract

Effective feature selection is essential for enhancing the performance of artificial intelligence models. It involves identifying feature combinations that optimize a given metric, but this is a challenging task due to the problem's exponential time complexity. In this study, we present an innovative heuristic called Evolutionary Quantum Feature Selection (EQFS) that employs the Quantum Circuit Evolution (QCE) algorithm. Our approach harnesses the unique capabilities of QCE, which utilizes shallow depth circuits to generate sparse probability distributions. Our computational experiments demonstrate that EQFS can identify good feature combinations with quadratic scaling in the number of features. To evaluate EQFS's performance, we counted the number of times a given classical model assesses the cost function for a specific metric, as a function of the number of generations.