QUANTUM-ASSISTED FEATURE SELECTION FOR IMPROVING PREDICTION MODEL ACCURACY ON LARGE AND IMBALANCED DATASETS

Abstract

One of the biggest obstacles to creating precise machine learning models is choosing representative and pertinent characteristics from big, unbalanced datasets. While too many features raise the risk of overfitting and computational expense, class imbalance frequently results in decreased accuracy and bias. The Simulated Annealing technique is used in this study to tackle a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem that is formulated as a quantum-assisted feature selection method to handle these problems. The technique seeks to reduce inter-feature redundancy and the number of selected features. There are 102,487 samples in the majority class and 11,239 in the minority class, totaling 28 characteristics in the experimental dataset. Nine ideal features were found during the feature selection method (12, 14, 15, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, and 28). Ten-fold cross-validation was used to assess a Random Forest Classifier that was trained using an 80:20 split. With precision, recall, f1-score, and accuracy all hitting 1.00, the suggested QUBO+SMOTE method demonstrated exceptional performance. Comparatively, QUBO without SMOTE performed worse with accuracy 0.95 and minority-class f1-score of only 0.71, whereas a traditional Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) approach obtained accuracy 0.97 with minority-class f1-score of 0.94. These findings indicate that QUBO can reduce dimensionality and address class imbalance which requires its integration with SMOTE. This study demonstrates how quantum computing can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of machine learning, especially for large-scale imbalanced datasets