A Comparative Study of Classical and Variational Quantum Machine Learning Models for Breast Cancer Classification

Divya Guthi

Abstract: Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer plays a critical role in improving patient survival rates and reducing treatment costs. Classical machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have demonstrated strong performance in medical diagnosis tasks; however, their scalability and representational limits motivate the exploration of emerging paradigms. Quantum Machine Learning (QML), particularly Variational Quantum Classifiers (VQC), has recently gained attention due to its potential to model complex decision boundaries using quantum circuits. This paper presents a comparative analysis between a Variational Quantum Classifier and classical machine learning models for binary breast cancer classification. The study employs dimensionality-reduced clinical data and evaluates model performance using accuracy, confusion matrices, decision boundary visualization, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves. Experimental results indicate that the VQC achieves competitive performance with classical approaches, demonstrating its feasibility for small-scale medical datasets and highlighting the promise of quantum-enhanced learning in healthcare applications.

Keywords: Quantum Machine Learning, Variational Quantum Classifier, Breast Cancer Classification, Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, PCA, ROC Curve

How to Cite?: Divya Guthi, "A Comparative Study of Classical and Variational Quantum Machine Learning Models for Breast Cancer Classification", Volume 14 Issue 12, December 2025, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 995-1003, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR251210205803, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR251210205803