Sleep-Disordered Breathing Detection with Quantum Recurrent Neural Networks
Abstract
This work investigates the application of Quantum Recurrent Neural Networks to the binary classification of sleep-disordered breathing events in time-series data, aiming to distinguish between apneic and normal breathing episodes. A variational classical--quantum architecture is proposed and evaluated against classical Recurrent Neural Network models. Experiments were conducted on multiple real-world datasets with varying levels of complexity to assess the strengths and limitations of the quantum approach. In the comparative analysis, both classical and quantum models showed comparable performance. The quantum model achieved superior performance on the smallest dataset, while yielding slightly weaker results in the most complex setting. However, the quantum approach exhibited notable strengths, such as competitive performance despite a drastically reduced parameter count and low-qubit regime, as well as good generalization capabilities. These results suggest that, despite current hardware and algorithmic limitations, variational quantum recurrent models represent a promising alternative for time-series classification as Quantum Computing technologies continue to mature.
