Related papers: Variational Fair Clustering
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…
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…
Clustering problems are fundamental to unsupervised learning. There is an increased emphasis on fairness in machine learning and AI; one representative notion of fairness is that no single demographic group should be over-represented among…
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…
Incorporating fairness constructs into machine learning algorithms is a topic of much societal importance and recent interest. Clustering, a fundamental task in unsupervised learning that manifests across a number of web data scenarios, has…
Spectral clustering is popular among practitioners and theoreticians alike. While performance guarantees for spectral clustering are well understood, recent studies have focused on enforcing ``fairness'' in clusters, requiring them to be…
Variable selection in cluster analysis is important yet challenging. It can be achieved by regularization methods, which realize a trade-off between the clustering accuracy and the number of selected variables by using a lasso-type penalty.…
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…
We propose a simple yet effective solution to tackle the often-competing goals of fairness and utility in classification tasks. While fairness ensures that the model's predictions are unbiased and do not discriminate against any particular…
We study the generalization of Correlation Clustering which incorporates fairness constraints via the notion of fairlets. The corresponding Fair Correlation Clustering problem has been studied from several perspectives to date, but has so…
Ensuring that classifiers are non-discriminatory or fair with respect to a sensitive feature (e.g., race or gender) is a topical problem. Progress in this task requires fixing a definition of fairness, and there have been several proposals…
In the application of data clustering to human-centric decision-making systems, such as loan applications and advertisement recommendations, the clustering outcome might discriminate against people across different demographic groups,…
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,…
Clustering algorithms are widely used in many societal resource allocation applications, such as loan approvals and candidate recruitment, among others, and hence, biased or unfair model outputs can adversely impact individuals that rely on…
We extend the fair machine learning literature by considering the problem of proportional centroid clustering in a metric context. For clustering $n$ points with $k$ centers, we define fairness as proportionality to mean that any $n/k$…
Clustering is an unsupervised learning task that aims to partition data into a set of clusters. In many applications, these clusters correspond to real-world constructs (e.g. electoral districts) whose benefit can only be attained by groups…
Matrix valued data has become increasingly prevalent in many applications. Most of the existing clustering methods for this type of data are tailored to the mean model and do not account for the dependence structure of the features, which…
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…
Algorithmic fairness has become a central concern in modern machine learning and AI applications. However, two pressing challenges remain: (1) The fairness guarantees of existing methods often rely on specific data distributional…
The remarkable attention which fair clustering has received in the last few years has resulted in a significant number of different notions of fairness. Despite the fact that these notions are well-justified, they are often motivated and…