| # Boolean Quadratic Programming SDP > Conic problems | LMIs | Standard Forms | Applications > Back | Combinatorial QP | Next Motivation: maximum cut (MAXCUT) problem Boolean quadratic programming Rank-constrained formulation SDP relaxation Sub-optimal solution via the SDP relaxation ## Motivation: MAXCUT Problem We consider an undirected graph with nodes, described by its weight matrix , with the weight of the arc joining node and (with the convention that the weight is zero if there these nodes have no edge connecting them). The maximum cut problem is to find a partition of the nodes in two complementary groups, so that the total weight of the edges that connect the two groups is maximized. The max-cut problem can be formalized via the following boolean quadratic problem: Here, the boolean variable corresponds to a particular assignement of each node into one of the two groups. The constraints in the above problem enforce the Boolean conditions on . We check that the term is zero if and only if and are equal, which means that node and node are in the same group; otherwise, the cost is . ## Boolean QP The above problem falls into the more general class of Boolean quadratic programs, which are of the form where , with of arbitrary sign. Boolean QPs, as well as the special case of max-cut problems, are combinatorial, and hard to solve exactly. However, theory (based on SDP relaxations seen below) says that we can approximate the above quantity with a relative error of at most (the number falls to in the case of MAX-CUT, which has special structure). ## Rank-Constrained Formulation We will introduce a semidefinite approximation to the problem, which is based on an expression of the original Boolean QP in terms of a matrix variable , with components , . We can write the relationship between the vector and the matrix more compactly, as We observe that is positive semi-definite by construction. We note that the objective of the Boolean QP, while quadratic in the original decision vector , is actually linear in the matrix , since The same is true of the constraints: Finally, we note that a given symmetric matrix has the form for some vector if and only if it is positive semi-definite and its rank is one. This means that we can formulate the Boolean QP in an equivalent, ’'rank-constrained’’ form: ## Semidefinite Relaxation The above rank-constrained problem is not convex, precisely due to the rank constraint. If we remove the constraint, we do obtain a convex problem — in fact, an SDP. This SDP is a relaxation of the original problem, that is, it is a new problem obtained by removing constraints. Since we are maximizing, the new problem yields an upper bound on the original one: We can check that indeed the problem of computing is an SDP: it involves a matrix variable that is constrained to the positive semi-definite cone; the other constraints are affine; the objective is linear. The gap between (the true value of the combinatorial problem) and (the SDP approximation) can be large, but not arbitrarily so. In fact, as mentioned above, it has been shown (by Nesterov in 1996) that the relative error satisfies independent of problem size (and of data matrix ).