Laplacian Eigenmaps with variational circuits: a quantum embedding of graph data

With the development of quantum algorithms, high-cost computations are being scrutinized in the hope of a quantum advantage. While graphs offer a convenient framework for multiple real-world problems, their analytics still comes with high computation and space. By mapping the graph data into a low dimensional space, in which graph structural information is preserved, the eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix constitute a powerful node embedding, called Laplacian Eigenmaps. Computing these embeddings is on its own an expensive task knowing that using specific sparse methods, the eigendecomposition of a Laplacian matrix has a cost of O$rn²$, r being the ratio of nonzero elements. We propose a method to compute a Laplacian Eigenmap using a quantum variational circuit. The idea of our algorithm is to reach the eigenstates of the laplacian matrix, which can be considered as a hamiltonian operator, by adapting the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm. By estimating the d first eigenvectors of the Laplacian at the same time, our algorithm directly generates a d dimension quantum embedding of the graph. We demonstrate that it is possible to use the embedding for graph machine learning tasks by implementing a quantum classifier on the top of it. The overall circuit consists in a full quantum node classification algorithm. Tests on 32 nodes graph with a quantum simulator shows that we can achieve similar performances as the classical laplacian eigenmap algorithm. Although mathematical properties of this approximate approach are not fully understood, this algorithm opens perspectives for graph pre-processing using noisy quantum computers.