A hybrid quantum ensemble learning model for malicious code detection

Quantum computing as a new computing model with parallel computing capability and high information carrying capacity, has attracted a lot of attention from researchers. Ensemble learning is an effective strategy often used in machine learning to improve the performance of weak classifiers. Currently, the classification performance of quantum classifiers is not satisfactory enough due to factors such as the depth of quantum circuit, quantum noise, and quantum coding method, etc. For this reason, this paper combined the ensemble learning idea and quantum classifiers to design a novel hybrid quantum machine learning model. Firstly, we run the Stacking method in classical machine learning to realize the dimensionality reduction of high-latitude data while ensuring the validity of data features. Secondly, we used the Bagging method and Bayesian hyperparameter optimization method applied to quantum support vector machine (QSVM), quantum K nearest neighbors (QKNN), variational quantum classifier (VQC). Thirdly, the voting method is used to ensemble the predict results of QSVM, QKNN, VQC as the final result. We applied the hybrid quantum ensemble machine learning model to malicious code detection. The experimental results show that the classification precision (accuracy, F1-score) of this model has been improved to 98.9% (94.5%, 94.24%). Combined with the acceleration of quantum computing and the higher precision rate, it can effectively deal with the growing trend of malicious codes, which is of great significance to cyberspace security.