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Related papers: Fair Algorithms for Clustering

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In this paper, we study correlation clustering under fairness constraints. Fair variants of $k$-median and $k$-center clustering have been studied recently, and approximation algorithms using a notion called fairlet decomposition have been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-03-04 Sara Ahmadian , Alessandro Epasto , Ravi Kumar , Mohammad Mahdian

Ensuring fairness in machine learning algorithms is a challenging and essential task. We consider the problem of clustering a set of points while satisfying fairness constraints. While there have been several attempts to capture group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Debajyoti Kar , Mert Kosan , Debmalya Mandal , Sourav Medya , Arlei Silva , Palash Dey , Swagato Sanyal

Traditionally, clustering algorithms focus on partitioning the data into groups of similar instances. The similarity objective, however, is not sufficient in applications where a fair-representation of the groups in terms of protected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Tai Le Quy , Arjun Roy , Gunnar Friege , Eirini Ntoutsi

Data summarization tasks are often modeled as $k$-clustering problems, where the goal is to choose $k$ data points, called cluster centers, that best represent the dataset by minimizing a clustering objective. A popular objective is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Ameet Gadekar , Aristides Gionis , Suhas Thejaswi

Fair clustering has traditionally focused on ensuring equitable group representation or equalizing group-specific clustering costs. However, Dickerson et al. (2025) recently showed that these fairness notions may yield undesirable or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Claire Jie Zhang , Seyed A. Esmaeili , Jamie Morgenstern

We study the fair variant of the classic $k$-median problem introduced by Chierichetti et al. [2017]. In the standard $k$-median problem, given an input pointset $P$, the goal is to find $k$ centers $C$ and assign each input point to one of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Arturs Backurs , Piotr Indyk , Krzysztof Onak , Baruch Schieber , Ali Vakilian , Tal Wagner

Clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised machine learning, and fair variants of it have recently received significant attention due to its societal implications. In this work we introduce a novel definition of individual fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Darshan Chakrabarti , John P. Dickerson , Seyed A. Esmaeili , Aravind Srinivasan , Leonidas Tsepenekas

The study of fair algorithms has become mainstream in machine learning and artificial intelligence due to its increasing demand in dealing with biases and discrimination. Along this line, researchers have considered fair versions of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Sayan Bandyapadhyay , Fedor V. Fomin , Tanmay Inamdar , Kirill Simonov

We study a variant of classical clustering formulations in the context of algorithmic fairness, known as diversity-aware clustering. In this variant we are given a collection of facility subsets, and a solution must contain at least a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Suhas Thejaswi , Ameet Gadekar , Bruno Ordozgoiti , Michal Osadnik

Clustering algorithms may unintentionally propagate or intensify existing disparities, leading to unfair representations or biased decision-making. Current fair clustering methods rely on notions of fairness that do not capture any…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-15 Fritz Bayer , Drago Plecko , Niko Beerenwinkel , Jack Kuipers

A clustering may be considered as fair on pre-specified sensitive attributes if the proportions of sensitive attribute groups in each cluster reflect that in the dataset. In this paper, we consider the task of fair clustering for scenarios…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Savitha Sam Abraham , Deepak P , Sowmya S Sundaram

Consensus clustering seeks to combine multiple clusterings of the same dataset, potentially derived by considering various non-sensitive attributes by different agents in a multi-agent environment, into a single partitioning that best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Diptarka Chakraborty , Kushagra Chatterjee , Debarati Das , Tien-Long Nguyen

In a recent work, [19] studied the following "fair" variants of classical clustering problems such as $k$-means and $k$-median: given a set of $n$ data points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and a binary type associated to each data point, the goal is to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-12-18 Lingxiao Huang , Shaofeng H. -C. Jiang , Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

We give a local search based algorithm for $k$-median and $k$-means (and more generally for any $k$-clustering with $\ell_p$ norm cost function) from the perspective of individual fairness. More precisely, for a point $x$ in a point set $P$…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Sepideh Mahabadi , Ali Vakilian

We incorporate group fairness into the algorithmic centroid clustering problem, where $k$ centers are to be located to serve $n$ agents distributed in a metric space. We refine the notion of proportional fairness proposed in [Chen et al.,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Bo Li , Lijun Li , Ankang Sun , Chenhao Wang , Yingfan Wang

Within the relatively busy area of fair machine learning that has been dominated by classification fairness research, fairness in clustering has started to see some recent attention. In this position paper, we assess the existing work in…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Deepak P

Individual fairness guarantees are often desirable properties to have, but they become hard to formalize when the dataset contains outliers. Here, we investigate the problem of developing an individually fair $k$-means clustering algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Binita Maity , Shrutimoy Das , Anirban Dasgupta

We study data clustering problems with $\ell_p$-norm objectives (e.g. $k$-Median and $k$-Means) in the context of individual fairness. The dataset consists of $n$ points, and we want to find $k$ centers such that (a) the objective is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Deeparnab Chakrabarty , Maryam Negahbani

A common distinction in fair machine learning, in particular in fair classification, is between group fairness and individual fairness. In the context of clustering, group fairness has been studied extensively in recent years; however,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-11 Matthäus Kleindessner , Pranjal Awasthi , Jamie Morgenstern

There are synergies of research interests and industrial efforts in modeling fairness and correcting algorithmic bias in machine learning. In this paper, we present a scalable algorithm for spectral clustering (SC) with group fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Ji Wang , Ding Lu , Ian Davidson , Zhaojun Bai