Clustering by quantum annealing on the three-level quantum elements qutrits

Clustering is grouping of data by the proximity of some properties. We report on the possibility of increasing the efficiency of clustering of points in a plane using artificial quantum neural networks after the replacement of the two-level neurons called qubits represented by the spins S = 1/2 by the three-level neurons called qutrits represented by the spins S = 1. The problem has been solved by the slow adiabatic change of the Hamiltonian in time. The methods for controlling a qutrit system using projection operators have been developed and the numerical simulation has been performed. The Hamiltonians for two well-known clustering methods, one-hot encoding and k-means, have been built. The first method has been used to partition a set of six points into three or two clusters and the second method, to partition a set of nine points into three clusters and seven points into four clusters. The simulation has shown that the clustering problem can be effectively solved on qutrits represented by the spins S = 1. The advantages of clustering on qutrits over that on qubits have been demonstrated. In particular, the number of qutrits required to represent \(N\) data points is smaller than the number of qubits by a factor of \(\log_{2} N/\log_{3} N\). For qutrits, the simplest is to partition the data points into three clusters rather than two ones. At the data partition into more than three clusters, it has been proposed to number the clusters by the numbers of states of the corresponding multi-spin subsystems, instead of using the numbers of individual spins. This reduces even more the number of qutrits (\(N\log_{3} K\) instead of \(NK\)) required to implement the algorithm.