Quantum-Aided Bayesian Learning for the Prediction and Uncertainty Quantification of Remaining Useful Life
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Abstract
To make predictions on the future states of engineering systems, prognostics has been increasingly relying on data-driven models and machine learning. Recent work has also looked at the potential of quantum machine learning to provide insight on the health state of systems. Nevertheless, these approaches treated the quantum component only as a deterministic predictor, in fact disregarding the uncertainty information. In this work, we propose a different approach to exploiting quantum circuits in prognostics. We focus on Bayesian learning of neural networks for Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction and uncertainty quantification. Here, the quantum circuit is introduced not as a data-driven model, but as a generator of neural network weights. Using Variational Inference, the quantum circuit can be trained to approximate the true posterior of the classical machine learning predictor. The overall method retains the data-processing ability of state-of-the-art machine learning models, while exploiting the quantum circuit to introduce uncertainty by sampling the model
space from a distribution that is classically nontrivial. We validate our approach on the task of predicting the End of Discharge of Li-ion batteries, using data generated from a simulator with tunable process uncertainty, and we compare the predictions obtained through quantum sampling with those from Flipout Bayesian neural networks, heteroscedastic neural networks and Monte Carlo Dropout. The results show that our quantum circuits learn to approximate the weight posterior and that the resulting data-driven models demonstrate accuracy and uncertainty quantification that is comparable if not superior to the baselines. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential of quantum computing for uncertainty-aware prognostics, and sets the stage for further investigations in this area.
How to Cite
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remaining useful life, bayesian neural networks, quantum computing, uncertainty, battery prognostics
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