TabularQGAN: a quantum generative model for tabular data synthesis

In this paper, we introduce a novel quantum generative model for synthesizing tabular data. Synthetic data is valuable in scenarios where real-world data is scarce or private, as it can be used to augment or replace existing datasets. As enterprise data is predominantly tabular and heterogeneous, often consisting of both categorical and numerical features, this task is relevant across various industries such as healthcare, finance, and software. Existing quantum generative models are designed for homogeneous data; we seek to fill this gap by proposing a quantum generative adversarial network architecture with flexible data encoding and a novel quantum circuit ansatz for effectively modeling tabular data. The proposed approach is tested on the MIMIC-III healthcare and Adult Census datasets, with extensive benchmarking against leading classical models, CTGAN, CopulaGAN, VAE-GMM, and an LLM-based approach using the be-GReaT framework for tabular data synthesis. We evaluated our model as a proof-of-concept on reduced feature subsets using a noiseless statevector simulator on classical hardware. Our simulations show that, for the MIMIC-III dataset, our quantum model achieves competitive, and in some cases, leading performance with respect to an overall similarity score used in the open-source Python library SDMetrics. Additionally, we evaluate the generalization capabilities of the models using two custom-designed metrics that demonstrate the ability of the proposed quantum model to generate useful and novel tabular samples.