  This paper deals with the problem of finding the globally optimal subset of h
elements from a larger set of n elements in d space dimensions so as to
minimize a quadratic criterion, with an special emphasis on applications to
computing the Least Trimmed Squares Estimator (LTSE) for robust regression. The
computation of the LTSE is a challenging subset selection problem involving a
nonlinear program with continuous and binary variables, linked in a highly
nonlinear fashion. The selection of a globally optimal subset using the branch
and bound (BB) algorithm is limited to problems in very low dimension,
tipically d<5, as the complexity of the problem increases exponentially with d.
We introduce a bold pruning strategy in the BB algorithm that results in a
significant reduction in computing time, at the price of a negligeable accuracy
lost. The novelty of our algorithm is that the bounds at nodes of the BB tree
come from pseudo-convexifications derived using a linearization technique with
approximate bounds for the nonlinear terms. The approximate bounds are computed
solving an auxiliary semidefinite optimization problem. We show through a
computational study that our algorithm performs well in a wide set of the most
difficult instances of the LTSE problem.
