  In this paper, we address the problem how to represent a classical data
distribution in a quantum system. The proposed method is to learn quantum
Hamiltonian that is such that its ground state approximates the given classical
distribution. We review previous work on the quantum Boltzmann machine (QBM)
and how it can be used to infer quantum Hamiltonians from quantum statistics.
We then show how the proposed quantum learning formalism can also be applied to
a purely classical data analysis. Representing the data as a rank one density
matrix introduces quantum statistics for classical data in addition to the
classical statistics. We show that quantum learning yields results that can be
significantly more accurate than the classical maximum likelihood approach,
both for unsupervised learning and for classification. The data density matrix
and the QBM solution show entanglement, quantified by the quantum mutual
information $I$. The classical mutual information in the data $I_c\le I/2=C$,
with $C$ maximal classical correlations obtained by choosing a suitable
orthogonal measurement basis. We suggest that the remaining mutual information
$Q=I/2$ is obtained by non orthogonal measurements that may violate the Bell
inequality. The excess mutual information $I-I_c$ may potentially be used to
improve the performance of quantum implementations of machine learning or other
statistical methods.
