Estimating shots and variance on noisy quantum circuits

We present a method for estimating the number of shots required to achieve a desired variance in the results of a quantum circuit. First, we establish a baseline for single-qubit characterisation of individual noise sources. We then move on to multi-qubit circuits, focusing on expectation-value circuits. We decompose the variance of the estimator into a sum of a statistical term and a bias floor. These are independently estimated with one additional run of the circuit. We test our method on a Variational Quantum Eigensolver for $H_2$ and show that we can predict the variance to within known error bounds. We go on to show that for IBM Pittsburgh's noise characteristics, at that instant, 7000 shots for the given circuit would have achieved a $\sigma^2 \approx 0.01$