Shallow entangled circuits for quantum time series prediction on IBM devices

Forecasting temporal dynamics underpins many areas of science and engineering, from large-scale atmospheric prediction to nanoscale quantum control. Classical approaches, including autoregressive models and deep neural networks, have advanced sequential learning often at the expense of known model order, or large dataset and parameters, resulting in computational cost. Here, we investigate whether quantum entanglement can serve as a resource for temporal pattern learning using shallow and structured quantum circuits. We have proposed a Quantum Time Series (QTS) framework that encodes normalised sequential data into single-qubit rotations and captures temporal correlations through forward and cross-entanglement layers. Among several encoding schemes, phase encoding-based sparse entanglement provides hardware efficiency by scaling to larger qubit systems with linear circuit depth and two-qubit complexity of for qubit size n. This offers a reduction in parameters and depth compared with deep variational quantum circuits such as Heisenberg-inspired circuits, and random-parametric unitary architectures. Experiments on synthetic and geophysical datasets show that shallow QTS circuits reproduce complex temporal pattern from limited data by leveraging structured quantum entanglement. Executions on IBM’s Heron and Eagle-class processors demonstrate robustness and scalability up to 100 qubits. These results suggest that structured entanglement may offer a short-term memory effect for time-series analysis, providing a scalable route for near-term quantum applications.