QKNN: Noise‐Resilient Quantum KNN Algorithm for High‐Accuracy Classification

ABSTRACT A quantum K‐nearest neighbors(QKNN) algorithm is proposed to offer superior performance compared to the classical KNN(CKNN) approach, improving classification accuracy, scalability, and robustness. Our approach optimizes Hadamard and rotation gates for quantum data encoding and efficiently embeds classical data into quantum states. Entangled gates, such as IsingXY and CNOT, enhance feature extraction and classification by enabling complex feature interactions. A new quantum distance metric based on swap test results is used to calculate similarity measures between quantum states. This algorithm offers superior accuracy and computational efficiency compared to traditional Euclidean distance metrics. We used three benchmark datasets to evaluate the suggested QKNN method. The results demonstrated that it outperformed the other two methods, classical KNN (CKNN) and quantum neural networks (QNN), as well as the more recent QKNN research. The proposed QKNN algorithm achieves prediction accuracies of 98.25%, 100%, and 99.27% for the three datasets, whereas the QNN achieves prediction accuracies of 97.17%, 83.33%, and 86.18%, respectively. Moreover, quantum noise challenges are addressed by integrating a Shor code‐based error mitigation strategy, which ensures stability of the algorithm and resilience to noisy quantum environments. The results demonstrate the scalability, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed QKNN algorithm.