Abstract We investigate a quantum-inspired approach to supervised multi-class classification based on the Pretty Good Measurement (PGM), viewed as an operator-valued decision rule derived from quantum state discrimination. The method associates each class with an encoded mixed state and performs classification through a single POVM construction, thus providing a genuinely multi-class strategy without reduction to pairwise or one-vs-rest schemes. In this perspective, classification is reformulated as the discrimination of a finite ensemble of class-dependent density operators, with performance governed by the geometry induced by the encoding map and by the overlap structure among classes. To assess the practical scope of this framework, we apply the PGM-based classifier to two biomedical radiomics case studies: histopathological subtyping of non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) and prostate cancer (PCa) risk stratification. The evaluation is conducted under protocols aligned with previously reported radiomics studies, enabling direct comparison with established classical baselines. The results show that the PGM-based classifier is consistently competitive and, in several settings, improves upon standard methods. In particular, the method performs especially well in the NSCLC binary and three-class tasks, while remaining competitive in the four-class case, where increased class overlap yields a more demanding discrimination geometry. In the PCa study, the PGM classifier remains close to the strongest ensemble baseline and exhibits clinically relevant sensitivity–specificity trade-offs across feature-selection scenarios. These findings support the relevance of PGM-based quantum-inspired decision rules as a mathematically well-motivated and practically viable extension of quantum state discrimination techniques to genuinely multi-class learning problems and provide further evidence of their applicability in high-dimensional biomedical settings.
Sergioli et al. (2026) studied this question.