Glossary

Quantum Kernel

by Frank Zickert

A **quantum kernel** is a function that measures the similarity between data points by mapping them into a **quantum feature space** using a quantum circuit. It’s used in **quantum machine learning** to compute inner products between these quantum states, capturing complex relationships that may be hard for classical kernels to represent. In short, it lets quantum systems generate richer feature mappings for kernel-based algorithms like SVMs.