Quantum support vector data description for anomaly detection

Abstract Anomaly detection is a critical problem in data analysis and pattern recognition, finding applications in various domains. We introduce quantum support vector data description (QSVDD), an unsupervised learning algorithm designed for anomaly detection. QSVDD utilizes a shallow-depth quantum circuit to learn a minimum-volume hypersphere that tightly encloses normal data, tailored for the constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing. Simulation results on the MNIST and Fashion MNIST image datasets, as well as credit card fraud detection, demonstrate that QSVDD outperforms both quantum autoencoder and deep learning-based approaches under similar training conditions. Notably, QSVDD requires an extremely small number of model parameters, which increases logarithmically with the number of input qubits. This enables efficient learning with a simple training landscape, presenting a compact quantum machine learning model with strong performance for anomaly detection.