# Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) with Mitiq¶

This is step-by-step tutorial on how to use the Mitiq toolchain for implementing probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) [1-3]. We use the Cirq library, but other frontends could be used in a similar way.

If you are only interested in applying PEC with Mitiq, see the quick start here.

In this notebook instead we present the full workflow of PEC, with more details and with a lower level of abstraction. In a practical use case it is not necessary to implement all the steps presented in this notebook, but they may still be useful for understanding PEC and how Mitiq works behind the scenes.

Furthermore, this notebook reproduces the results of the PEC example reported in Figure 5 of the Mitiq white paper [7].

## Outline¶

Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is an error mitigation method [1-3]. Its practical implementation can be divided in the following 4 tasks:

• Task 1: Expanding an ideal gate as linear combination of implementable noisy gates;

• Task 2: Sampling an implementable gate from the quasi-probability representation of an ideal gate;

• Task 3: Sampling an implementable circuit from the quasi-probability representation of an ideal circuit;

• Task 4: Infer an ideal expectation value from the noisy execution of the sampled circuits.

## Importing packages¶

from IPython.display import display as ipython_display
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

from cirq import LineQubit, NamedQubit, Circuit, X, Y, Z, channel, H, CNOT, depolarize, DensityMatrixSimulator

from mitiq import pec
from mitiq.pec import NoisyOperation, OperationRepresentation
from mitiq.pec.representations.depolarizing import local_depolarizing_kraus
from mitiq.pec.channels import kraus_to_super
from mitiq.utils import _circuit_to_choi


## Task 1: Representing an ideal gate as linear combination of implementable noisy gates¶

The first task we need to solve is to represent an arbitrary ideal unitary gate $$\mathcal G$$ as a linear combination of implementable (noisy) gates [1-3]:

$\mathcal G = \eta_1 \tilde{\mathcal G}_1 + \eta_2 \tilde{\mathcal G}_2 + \dots,$

where $$\{\eta_j\}$$ are real coefficients and $$\{\tilde{\mathcal G}_j\}$$ are the implementable noisy gates, i.e., those which can be actually applied by a noisy quantum computer.

Note: This representation depends on the particular noise model.

### Example: representing an idea single-qubit gate in a noisy basis with depolarizing noise¶

For example, if the implementable gates are equal to any single-qubit unitary followed by a depolarizing channel [4]:

$\tilde{\mathcal G} =\mathcal E \circ \mathcal G \quad \text{where,}\quad \mathcal E(\rho) = (1 - \epsilon ) \rho + \epsilon I/2 ,$

then, it is easy to show [1][4][6] that the following representation holds for any single-qubit gate $$\mathcal G$$:

$\mathcal G= \eta_1 \tilde{\mathcal G}_1 + \eta_2 \tilde{\mathcal G}_2 + \eta_3 \tilde{\mathcal G}_3 + \eta_4 \tilde{\mathcal G}_4,$

where,

$\eta_1 =\left(1 + \frac{3}{4} \frac{\epsilon}{1- \epsilon} \right ), \qquad \tilde{\mathcal G}_1 = \mathcal E \circ \mathcal G, \quad$
$\eta_2 =- \frac{1}{4}\frac{\epsilon}{1- \epsilon} , \qquad \qquad \tilde{\mathcal G}_2 = \mathcal E \circ \mathcal X \circ \mathcal G,$
$\eta_3 =-\frac{1}{4}\frac{\epsilon}{1- \epsilon} , \qquad \qquad \tilde{\mathcal G}_3 = \mathcal E \circ \mathcal Y \circ \mathcal G,$
$\eta_4 =- \frac{1}{4}\frac{\epsilon}{1- \epsilon} , \qquad \qquad \tilde{\mathcal G}_4 = \mathcal E \circ \mathcal Z \circ \mathcal G.$

Here and in what follows, we use the same notation of [6] where calligraphic symbols stand for super-operators acting on the density matrix $$\rho$$ of the qubits as $$\mathcal G(\rho)= G \rho G^\dagger$$.

### Using the mitiq.pec.representations sub-module¶

Assume that we want to represent the ideal bit-flip gate $$\mathcal G=\mathcal X$$ in the presence of depolarizing noise with $$p=0.1$$, where $$p$$ is the error probability. For a single-qubit depolarizing channel the error probability is related to the parameter $$\epsilon$$ introduced above by the formula $$\epsilon=(4/3)p$$ [4] .

# Set the level of depolarizing noise
BASE_NOISE = 0.1
eps = 4 / 3 * BASE_NOISE

# Set the ideal operation to represent a noisy basis
q = NamedQubit("q0")
ideal_operation = Circuit(X(q))

# Kraus operators for a single-qubit depolarizing channel
depo_kraus = local_depolarizing_kraus(BASE_NOISE, num_qubits=1)

# Super-operator for a single-qubit depolarizing channel
depo_super = kraus_to_super(depo_kraus)


We can now apply the analytic formula that we presented above. We first define the coefficients $$\{\eta_j\}$$:

eta_neg = (1 / 4) * eps / (1 - eps)
etas = [1 + 3 * eta_neg, -eta_neg, -eta_neg, -eta_neg]

# Assert that this is a noramlized quasi-probability distribution
assert np.isclose(sum(etas), 1)


Now we define the corresponding noisy operations $$\{\tilde G_j\}$$. We’ll use the NoisyOperation class of Mitiq.

basis_circuits = [
ideal_operation,
ideal_operation + Circuit(X(q)),
ideal_operation + Circuit(Y(q)),
ideal_operation + Circuit(Z(q)),
]

basis_matrices = [depo_super @ kraus_to_super(channel(c)) for c in basis_circuits]

noisy_operations = [NoisyOperation(circuit=c, channel_matrix=m) for c, m in zip(basis_circuits, basis_matrices)]


Note: A NoisyOperation can also be initialized without a channel_matrix. Indeed the explicit superoperator matrix is used only for (optional) numerical optimizations.

We are ready to define quasi-probability representation of the ideal gate. We’ll use the OperationRepresentation class of Mitiq.

basis_expansion = dict(zip(noisy_operations, etas))
x_rep = OperationRepresentation(ideal=ideal_operation, basis_expansion=basis_expansion)

print(
f"This is the representation of the ideal operation {ideal_operation}, "
"assuming a basis of implementable operations\n"
f"with depolarizing noise of strength p={BASE_NOISE}:\n\n",
x_rep
)

This is the representation of the ideal operation q0: ───X───, assuming a basis of implementable operations
with depolarizing noise of strength p=0.1:

q0: ───X─── = 1.115*q0: ───X───-0.038*q0: ───X───X───-0.038*q0: ───X───Y───-0.038*q0: ───X───Z───


The meaning of the above equation is the following: the left hand side executed on a noiseless device is equivalent to the right hand side executed on a device with depolarizing noise $$p$$=BASE_NOISE.

### Built-in representations for simple noise models¶

Since building representations of ideal gates with depolarizing (or amplitude damping) noise is a very common scenario, in Mitiq there are some built-in functions for this task. All the code in the previous cells can be replaced by the following:

x_rep_direct = pec.represent_operation_with_local_depolarizing_noise(
ideal_operation = ideal_operation,
noise_level=BASE_NOISE,
)
# Test that x_rep_direct is equal to the representation manually defined in the previous cells.
assert x_rep_direct == x_rep


### Numerically finding optimal representations with arbitrary noise models¶

For a general noise model, there are no built-in functions for generating quasi-probability representations. Moreover, usually, there are no analytical formulas that can be applied to get a representation. In this general case, given a set of NoisyOperation(s) initialized with the associated numerical super-operator (i.e., with the channel_matrix argument), one can numerically find a quasi-probability representation of an arbitrary ideal gate. In general, the representation is not unique and the optimal choice is the one minimizing the one-norm of the quasi-probability $$\gamma=\sum_j |\eta_j|$$.

noisy_basis = pec.NoisyBasis(*noisy_operations)
opt_rep = pec.representations.find_optimal_representation(
ideal_operation=ideal_operation,
noisy_basis=noisy_basis,
)

# Test that the numerical representation is equal to the previous analytical result.
assert opt_rep == x_rep


Note: Each NoisyOperation must be passed as an individual argument to NoisyBasis. Hence the unpacking operator *.

## Task 2: Sampling from the quasi-probability representation of an ideal gate¶

In the previous section, we represented an ideal gate as a linear combination of noisy gates. This is an exact formula that links the the noisy gates to the ideal gate.

To improve the computation efficiency, instead of using the exact formula, in PEC a probabilistic approximation is used. Basically, one can use a Monte Carlo importance sampling estimation of the exact sum $$\sum_j \eta_j \tilde{\mathcal G}_j$$, in such a way that more weight (importance) is given to the coefficients $$\eta_j$$ with larger magnitude.

This can be obtained via the probability distribution $$p(j):=|\eta_j|/ \gamma$$, where $$\gamma=\sum_j |\eta_j|$$. An ideal gate can be re-written as

$\mathcal G = \sum_j \eta_j \tilde{\mathcal G}_j = \gamma \sum_ j p(j)\, \text{sign}(\eta_j)\, \tilde{\mathcal G}_j.$

If we sample $$j$$ from $$p(j)$$, we obtain a statistical random variable $$\hat j$$. The key fact at the basis of the PEC technique is that, given the random variable $$\hat j$$, the probabilistic super-operator operator

$\hat{\mathcal G} = \gamma \, \text{sign}(\eta_{\hat j}) \tilde{\mathcal G}_{\hat j},$

is an unbiased estimator for the ideal gate $$\mathcal G$$. That is to say, in the limit of infinite samples, the sampling average of $$\hat{\mathcal G}$$ converges exactly to $$\mathcal G$$.

Note: An introduction to Monte Carlo sampling of quantum gates and quantum circuits can be found in [5]. This technique was applied to error mitigation in [1-2].

### Sampling from a gate representation with Mitiq¶

In practice, taking a sample of the estimator $$\hat{\mathcal G}$$ corresponds to sampling a tuple of objects $$(\tilde G_j, \text{sign}(\eta_j), \eta_j)$$ corresponding to an index $$j$$, that can be used to experimentally evaluate $$\hat{\mathcal G}$$. In Mitiq one can use the sample() method of an OperationRepresentation as follows.

# Set a seed for reproducibility
rnd_state = np.random.RandomState(12)

# Take 10 samples from the quasi-probability representation x_rep
print("Sampled operation | sign  |  eta_j")
print("-------------------------------------")
for _ in range(10):
sampled_tuple = x_rep.sample(random_state=rnd_state)
print(f"{sampled_tuple[0].__str__().ljust(18)}| {sampled_tuple[1]:3}   | {sampled_tuple[2]:7.4f}")

Sampled operation | sign  |  eta_j
-------------------------------------
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───X───   |  -1   | -0.0385
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154
q0: ───X───Y───   |  -1   | -0.0385
q0: ───X───       |   1   |  1.1154


By running the sampled operations in the presence of depolarizing noise, re-scaling by their sign by the representation norm, one gets an unbiased approximation of the ideal gate. We can test this fact, by comparing the super-operator matrices of the ideal gate $$\mathcal G$$ and of $$\langle \hat{\mathcal G} \rangle_{\rm samples}$$.

ideal_operation_matrix = kraus_to_super(channel(ideal_operation))
noisy_operation_matrix = depo_super @ ideal_operation_matrix

# Take samples
rnd_state = np.random.RandomState(3)
samples = [x_rep.sample(random_state=rnd_state) for _ in range(1000)]

gamma = x_rep.norm
# Build unmbiased super-operator matrices
# Below s[0] is the sampled NoisyOperation, s[1] is the associated sign.
unbiased_matrices =[gamma * s[1] * s[0].channel_matrix for s in samples]
pec_matrix = np.average(unbiased_matrices, axis=0)

print(
"Error between the ideal and the noisy super-operator matrices:",
round(np.linalg.norm(ideal_operation_matrix - noisy_operation_matrix), 5),
)
print(
"Error between the ideal and the PEC super-operator matrices:",
round(np.linalg.norm(ideal_operation_matrix - pec_matrix), 5),
)

Error between the ideal and the noisy super-operator matrices: 0.23094
Error between the ideal and the PEC super-operator matrices: 0.0197


The above test shows how PEC is able to reduce the noise of an individual gate. In the next section we extend this technique to a circuit composed of many gates.

## Task 3: Sampling from the quasi-probability representation of an ideal circuit¶

In this section we extend the previous sampling approach to an ideal circuit which is composed of multiple ideal gates. In practice we need to apply the following steps:

• sample from the quasi-probability representation of each ideal gate of the circuit (Task 2):

• multiply the sign of each sampled gate to obtain the global sign associated to the full circuit.

• multiply the gamma of each sampled gate to obtain the global gamma associated to the full circuit.

NOTE: The fact that one can reduce the global sampling into a (Markov) chain of independent local sampling is a consequence of the Monte Carlo approach. See, e.g., [1] or [5].

The result of this procedure will produce an unbiased estimator $$\hat{\mathcal U} = \hat{\mathcal G}_t \circ \dots \circ \hat{\mathcal G}_2 \circ \hat{\mathcal G}_1$$ of the ideal circuit $$\mathcal U = \mathcal G_t \circ \dots \circ \mathcal G_2 \circ \mathcal G_1$$. Similarly to the previous case of a single-gate estimator, the sampling average of the circuit estimator $$\hat{\mathcal U}$$ converges (in the limit of many samples) to the ideal circuit $$\mathcal U$$.

### Sampling from a circuit representation with Mitiq¶

Let us first define a simple 2-qubit circuit:

from cirq import X, H, CNOT

seed = np.random.RandomState(0)
q0 = NamedQubit("q0")
q1 = NamedQubit("q1")
ideal_circuit = Circuit(X(q0), H(q1), CNOT(q0, q1))
ideal_circuit

q0: ───X───@───
│
q1: ───H───X───

The corresponding noisy circuit, assuming a local depolarizing noise model, is:

noisy_circuit = Circuit([[layer, depolarize(BASE_NOISE).on_each((q0, q1))] for layer in ideal_circuit])
noisy_circuit

q0: ───X───D(0.1)───@───D(0.1)───
│
q1: ───H───D(0.1)───X───D(0.1)───

We need to build a quasi-probability representation for all the ideal gates of the circuit. We can employ a helper function from mitiq.pec.representations.

representations = pec.representations.represent_operations_in_circuit_with_local_depolarizing_noise(
ideal_circuit=ideal_circuit,
noise_level=BASE_NOISE,
)

print(f"{len(representations)} quasi-probability representations created.")
print("One for each gate of the input ideal circuit.\n")

3 quasi-probability representations created.
One for each gate of the input ideal circuit.


We can use the Mitiq function pec.sampling.sample_circuit(), to sample from the quasi-probability distribution of the full circuit.

rnd_state = np.random.RandomState(4)

sampled_circuits, signs, gamma = pec.sampling.sample_circuit(
ideal_circuit, representations, num_samples=1000, random_state = rnd_state,
)


The function sample_circuit returns a tuple Tuple[List[QPROGRAM], List[int], float], corrsponding to:

• A list of num_samples circuits sampled from the representation of the ideal circuit;

• The associated list of signs;

• The 1-norm (gamma) of the quasi-distribution of the full circuit.

By running the sampled circuits in the presence of depolarizing noise, re-scaling by the sign and by $$\gamma$$, one obtains an unbiased approximation of the ideal circuit. We can test this, by comparing the Choi states associated to the ideal circuit $$\mathcal U$$ and to $$\langle \hat{\mathcal U} \rangle_{\rm samples}$$.

ideal_circuit_choi = _circuit_to_choi(ideal_circuit)

noisy_circuit_choi = _circuit_to_choi(noisy_circuit)

# Get the Choi sates associated to many umbiased samples of the PEC estimator
unbiased_samples_chois =[
gamma * s * _circuit_to_choi(c.with_noise(depolarize(BASE_NOISE))) for c, s in zip(sampled_circuits, signs)
]

pec_estimated_choi = np.average(unbiased_samples_chois, axis=0)

print(
"Error between the Choi state of ideal circuit and the Choi state of the noisy circuit:",
round(np.linalg.norm(ideal_circuit_choi - noisy_circuit_choi), 5),
)
print(
"Error between the Choi state of ideal circuit and the Choi state of the PEC circuit:",
round(np.linalg.norm(ideal_circuit_choi - pec_estimated_choi), 5),
)

Error between the Choi state of ideal circuit and the Choi state of the noisy circuit: 0.28011
Error between the Choi state of ideal circuit and the Choi state of the PEC circuit: 0.05036


The above test shows how PEC is able to reduce the noise of the global channel induced by a noisy circuit. In a real-world scenario however, reconstructing the matrix representation of the channel is in general unfeasible. In practice, one can use PEC for estimating specific expectation values as linear combination of measurable expectation values, as shown in the next section.

## Task 4: Infer an error-mitigated expectation value with PEC¶

Let us define a function which executes a circuit with depolarizing noise and returns an expectation value of some observable of interest $$\mathcal A$$. In this particular example, we take as observable the projector on the zero state, i.e., $$\mathcal A = |00 \dots \rangle \langle 00\dots|$$).

SIMULATOR = DensityMatrixSimulator()

def noisy_executor(circ: Circuit, noise_level=BASE_NOISE) -> float:
"""Simulates a circuit with depolarizing noise and returns the expectation value
of the projector on the ground state |00...><00...|.
"""
noisy_circuit = circ.with_noise(depolarize(noise_level))
rho = SIMULATOR.simulate(noisy_circuit).final_density_matrix
return np.real(rho[0, 0])

def ideal_executor(circ: Circuit) -> float:
return noisy_executor(circ, noise_level=0)

print("Ideal expectation value:", ideal_executor(ideal_circuit))
print("Noisy expectation value:", noisy_executor(ideal_circuit, BASE_NOISE))

Ideal expectation value: 0.0
Noisy expectation value: 0.06222223


Now, in order to obtain a mitigated estimate the ideal expectation value, one should:

• sample many circuits from the quasi-probability representation of the ideal circuit as shown in the previous section;

• execute all the samples with the noisy_executor and get a list of noisy expectation values;

• average with suitable weights (signs and $$\gamma$$) to estimate the ideal expectation value.

Instead of manually implementing all these steps, we’ll use the execute_with_pec function of the mitiq.pec module. Mitiq will take care of all the necessary steps (sampling, executing, averaging) behind the scenes and will directly provide an error mitigated expectation value to the user.

### Using the mitiq.pec.execute_with_pec() function¶

If not already done, one must define an OperationRepresentation for each operation of the ideal circuit.

representations = pec.representations.represent_operations_in_circuit_with_local_depolarizing_noise(
ideal_circuit=ideal_circuit,
noise_level=BASE_NOISE,
)


Given the noisy_executor and the list of representations (representations) one can apply PEC with a few lines of code.

ideal_expectation_value = ideal_executor(ideal_circuit)

unmitigated_expectation_value = noisy_executor(ideal_circuit)

pec_value, pec_data = pec.execute_with_pec(
circuit=ideal_circuit,
executor=noisy_executor,
representations=representations,
num_samples = 1000,
full_output=True,
random_state = np.random.RandomState(7),
)

print("Error without PEC:", abs(ideal_expectation_value - unmitigated_expectation_value))
print("Error with PEC:", abs(ideal_expectation_value - pec_value))

Error without PEC: 0.06222223
Error with PEC: 0.0018372794058112286


All the raw data related to the PEC process are recorded in pec_data. For example, we can extract the PEC statistical error (due to a finite number of Monte Carlo samples). This can be quantified by the square root of the mean squared deviation of the raw unbiased samples. It can be extracted form pec_data as follows.

print(f"The statistical error associated to the PEC estimate is: {pec_data['pec_error']:.5f}")

The statistical error associated to the PEC estimate is: 0.01121


### Visualizing the histogram of PEC samples¶

We can also visualize the histogram of the raw Monte Carlo samples (pec_data["unbiased_estimators"]). The mean of the histogram is shown with a green line and corresponds to the final error-mitigated result. This is closer to the ideal expectation value (zero in this example) compared to the unmitigated expectation value (red dotted line).

data = np.round(pec_data["unbiased_estimators"]- pec_value, 5)

y_limit = 0.8 * len(data)
binwidth = 0.1
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 4))
plt.hist(data, label="PEC samples", color="lightgray", bins=np.arange(min(data), max(data) + binwidth, binwidth))
plt.vlines(pec_value, 0, y_limit, "green", label="PEC value", linewidth=2.5)
# plt.vlines(ideal_expectation_value, 0, y_limit, "black", linestyle="dotted", label="Ideal Expectation Value", linewidth=3.0)
plt.vlines(unmitigated_expectation_value, 0, y_limit, "red", linestyle="dashed", label="Unmitigated Value", linewidth=2.5)
plt.xlabel('Expectation Value', fontsize=14)
plt.ylabel('Counts', fontsize=14)
plt.legend(fontsize=12)
plt.show()
# Uncomment next line to save the figure
# fig.savefig('pec_hist.pdf')


Note: The histogram is very clustered because of the particular choice of noise model (depolarizing) and because the noisy_executor is based on an exact simulation of the density matrix without shot noise. A more regular histogram could be obtained sub-dividing all the samples into independent batches and evaluating the statistical distribution of the corresponding results (see e.g. the numerical analysis in Figure 3 of [6]).

## References¶

1. K. Temme, S. Bravyi, J. M. Gambetta, Error Mitigation for Short-Depth Quantum Circuits, arXiv:1612.02058.

2. S. Endo, S. C. Benjamin, Y. Li, Practical Quantum Error Mitigation for Near-Future Applications, arXiv:1712.09271.

3. S. Zhang, Y. Lu, K. Zhang, W. Chen, Y. Li, J.-N Zhang, K. Kim, Error-Mitigated Quantum Gates Exceeding Physical Fidelities in a Trapped-Ion System, arXiv:1905.10135.

4. R. Takagi, Optimal resource cost for error mitigation, arXiv:2006.12509.

5. H. Pashayan, J. J. Wallman, S. D. Bartlett, Estimating outcome probabilities of quantum circuits using quasiprobabilities, arXiv:1503.07525.

6. A. Mari, N. Shammah, W. J. Zeng, Extending quantum probabilistic error cancellation by noise scaling, arXiv:2108.02237.

7. R. LaRose, A. Mari, S. Kaiser, P. J. Karalekas, A. A. Alves, P. Czarnik, M. El Mandouh, M. H. Gordon, Y. Hindy, A. Robertson, P. Thakre, N. Shammah, W. J. Zeng, Mitiq: A software package for error mitigation on noisy quantum computers, arXiv:2009.04417.

This notebook was executed with following version of Mitiq:

import mitiq


Mitiq: A Python toolkit for implementing error mitigation on quantum computers
==============================================================================
Authored by: Mitiq team, 2020 & later (https://github.com/unitaryfund/mitiq)

Mitiq Version:	0.10.0

Core Dependencies
-----------------
Cirq Version:	0.10.0
NumPy Version:	1.20.3
SciPy Version:	1.7.1

Optional Dependencies
---------------------
PyQuil Version:	2.28.2
Qiskit Version:	0.24.0
Braket Version:	1.9.5

Python Version:	3.7.9
Platform Info:	Linux (x86_64)