Model-free readout-error mitigation for quantum expectation values

Measurements on current quantum-hardware are subject to hardware imperfections that lead to readout-errors. These errors manifest themselves as a bias in quantum expectation values. Here, we propose a method to remove this bias from the expectation values of Pauli observables. No specific form of the noise is assumed, other than requiring that it is `weak. We apply a method that forces the bias in the expectation value to appear as a multiplicative factor irrespective of the actual noise process. This factor can be measured directly and removed, at the cost of an increase in the sampling complexity for the observable. A bound relating the error in the expectation value to the sample complexity is derived.