This paper is concerned with the quadratic regression problem, where the goal is to find the unknown state (numerical parameters) of a system modeled by a set of equations that are quadratic in the state. We focus on the setting when a subset of equations of fixed cardinality is subject to errors of arbitrary magnitudes (potentially adversarial). We develop two methods to address this problem, which are both based on conic optimization and are able to accept any available prior knowledge on the solution as an input. We derive sufficient conditions for guaranteeing the correct recovery of the unknown state for each method and show that one method provides a better accuracy while the other one scales better to large-scale systems. The obtained conditions consist in bounds on the number of bad measurements each method can tolerate without producing a nonzero estimation error. In the case when no prior knowledge is available, we develop an iterative-based conic optimization technique. It is proved that the proposed methods allow up to half of the total number of measurements to be grossly erroneous.The efficacy of the developed methods is demonstrated in different case studies, including data analytics for a European power grid.

This paper is concerned with the class of non-convex optimization problems with orthogonality constraints. We develop computationally efficient relaxations that transform non-convex orthogonality constrained problems into polynomial-time solvable surrogates. A novel penalization technique is used to enforce feasibility and derive certain conditions under which the constraints of the original non-convex problem are guaranteed to be satisfied. Moreover, we extend our approach to a feasibility-preserving sequential scheme that solves penalized relaxation to obtain near-globally optimal points. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two practical applications in machine learning.