Variational Quantum Feature Selection for High-Dimensional Classification: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach

¹ Data Science Institute, Saint Peter's University, New Jersey, USA
² School of Computing Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India

^* Corresponding author: sjagannathan©saintpeters.edu
^** thomasabraham.jv©vit.ac.in
^*** yogesh.c©vit.ac.in
^† franklin.joel2024©vitstudent.ac.in

Published online: 23 March 2026

Abstract

Choosing which features to retain from a high-dimensional dataset is one of the more practically consequential decisions in building a machine learning pipeline, yet it is rarely treated as anything other than a preprocessing afterthought. In this paper we ask whether quantum computation can play a meaningful role in that decision. We present Variational Quantum Feature Selection (VQFS), a method that assigns trainable scalar weights to input features and folds those weights directly into the rotation angles of a parameterized quantum circuit. An Ll penalty on the weight vector encourages many weights to collapse toward zero during training, leaving a compact subset of features that the circuit has learned to rely on. Because the weights are differentiable, the whole system-feature selector and quantum classifier together-is trained end-to-end with gradient descent rather than through the combinatorial search that makes classical wrapper methods expensive. We built VQFS on top of the PennyLane simulator so that it runs on an ordinary laptop without access to quantum hardware. Testing on the Breast Cancer Wisconsin, Wine, and Iris benchmarks, we found that VQFS matched or beat five classical baselines (Lasso, PCA, Random Forest importance, Mutual Information, and RFE) on accuracy while cutting the feature count by 25-60%. Five-fold cross-validation showed the gains were consistent rather than the result of a lucky split. We see this work as a small but concrete step toward integrating quantum methods into the full machine learning workflow, not just the classification stage.