The stock markets have become a popular topic within machine learning (ML) communities, with one particular application being stock price prediction. However, accurately predicting the stock market is a challenging task due to the various factors within financial markets. With the introduction of ML, prediction techniques have become more efficient but computationally demanding for classical computers. Given the rise of quantum computing (QC), which holds great promise for being exponentially faster than current classical computers, it is natural to explore ML within the QC domain. In this study, we leverage a hybrid quantum-classical ML approach to predict a company's stock price. We integrate classical long short-term memory (LSTM) with QC, resulting in a new variant called QLSTM. We initially validate the proposed QLSTM model by leveraging an IBM quantum simulator running on a classical computer, after which we conduct predictions using an IBM real quantum computer. Thereafter, we evaluate the performance of our model using the root mean square error (RMSE) and prediction accuracy. Additionally, we perform a comparative analysis, evaluating the prediction performance of the QLSTM model against several other classical models. Further, we explore the impacts of hyperparameters on the QLSTM model to determine the best configuration. Our experimental results demonstrate that while the classical LSTM model achieved an RMSE of 0.0693 and a prediction accuracy of 0.8815, the QLSTM model exhibited superior performance, achieving values of 0.0602 and 0.9736, respectively. Furthermore, the QLSTM outperformed other classical models in both metrics.
