Rank-one convexification for quadratic optimization problems with step function penalties

Abstract: We investigate convexification for convex quadratic optimization with step function penalties. Such problems can be cast as mixed-integer quadratic optimization problems, where binary variables are used to encode the non-convex step function. First, we derive the convex hull for the epigraph of a quadratic function defined by a rank-one matrix and step function penalties. Using this rank-one convexification, we develop copositive and semi-definite relaxations for general convex quadratic functions. Leveraging these findings, we construct convex formulations to the support vector machine problem with 0--1 loss and show that they yield robust estimators in settings with anomalies and outliers.