A Hybrid Dimensionality Reduction and Quantum Support Vector Machine for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Abstract

Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs) have recently emerged as a promising approach for biomedical classification tasks. However, their practical deployment remains constrained by limited qubit availability and sensitivity to high-dimensional feature spaces. This study proposes a hybrid framework integrating Pearson correlation–based feature selection and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with QSVM for breast cancer diagnosis. First, Pearson correlation analysis is employed to remove redundant and weakly relevant features. Subsequently, PCA projects the selected attributes into a compact subspace while preserving most of the original data variance. This dimensionality reduction strategy decreases the number of qubits required for quantum encoding and improves computational efficiency. Experiments conducted on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset demonstrate that the proposed hybrid QSVM achieves 98% classification accuracy, outperforming or matching existing classical and quantum-based approaches. The results confirm that combining classical preprocessing techniques with quantum classifiers provides a robust and resource-efficient solution for biomedical data analysis.