Quantum Machine Learning for Radio Astronomy

Abstract: In this work we introduce a novel approach to the pulsar classification problem in time-domain radio astronomy using a Born machine, often referred to as a quantum neural network. Using a single-qubit architecture, we show that the pulsar classification problem maps well to the Bloch sphere and that comparable accuracies to more classical machine learning approaches are achievable. We introduce a novel single-qubit encoding for the pulsar data used in this work and show that this performs comparably to a multi-qubit QAOA encoding.