Benchmarking Quantum Kernel Support Vector Machines Against Classical Baselines on Tabular Data (Code & Data)

Reproducibility archive (code + manuscript) for the paper "Benchmarking Quantum Kernel Support Vector Machines Against Classical Baselines on Tabular Data: A Rigorous Empirical Study with Hardware Validation" (arXiv: 2604. 18837). The archive contains the full Python benchmark framework, experiment configurations, unit tests, and the compiled manuscript. Quantum kernel methods have been proposed as a promising approach for leveraging near-term quantum computers for supervised learning, yet rigorous benchmarks against strong classical baselines remain scarce. We present a comprehensive empirical study of quantum kernel support vector machines (QSVMs) across nine binary classification datasets, four quantum feature maps, three classical kernels, and multiple noise models, totalling 970 experiments with strict nested cross-validation. Our analysis spans four phases: (i) statistical significance testing; (ii) learning curve analysis; (iii) hardware validation on IBM ibmfez (Heron r2) ; and (iv) seed sensitivity analysis. A Kruskal–Wallis factorial analysis reveals that dataset choice dominates performance variance (² = 0. 73), while kernel type accounts for only 9%. Spectral analysis offers a mechanistic explanation: current quantum feature maps produce eigenspectra that are either too flat or too concentrated, missing the intermediate profile of the best classical kernel (RBF). The complete benchmark suite is publicly available to facilitate reproduction and extension.