AUTHOR=Khan Saad Zafar , Muzammil Nazeefa , Ghafoor Salman , Khan Haibat , Zaidi Syed Mohammad Hasan , Aljohani Abdulah Jeza , Aziz Imran TITLE=Quantum long short-term memory (QLSTM) vs. classical LSTM in time series forecasting: a comparative study in solar power forecasting JOURNAL=Frontiers in Physics VOLUME=12 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2024.1439180 DOI=10.3389/fphy.2024.1439180 ISSN=2296-424X ABSTRACT=

Accurate solar power forecasting is pivotal for the global transition towards sustainable energy systems. This study conducts a meticulous comparison between Quantum Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) and classical Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for solar power production forecasting. The primary objective is to evaluate the potential advantages of QLSTMs, leveraging their exponential representational capabilities, in capturing the intricate spatiotemporal patterns inherent in renewable energy data. Through controlled experiments on real-world photovoltaic datasets, our findings reveal promising improvements offered by QLSTMs, including accelerated training convergence and substantially reduced test loss within the initial epoch compared to classical LSTMs. These empirical results demonstrate QLSTM’s potential to swiftly assimilate complex time series relationships, enabled by quantum phenomena like superposition. However, realizing QLSTM’s full capabilities necessitates further research into model validation across diverse conditions, systematic hyperparameter optimization, hardware noise resilience, and applications to correlated renewable forecasting problems. With continued progress, quantum machine learning can offer a paradigm shift in renewable energy time series prediction, potentially ushering in an era of unprecedented accuracy and reliability in solar power forecasting worldwide. This pioneering work provides initial evidence substantiating quantum advantages over classical LSTM models while acknowledging present limitations. Through rigorous benchmarking grounded in real-world data, our study illustrates a promising trajectory for quantum learning in renewable forecasting.