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Related papers: Fairness in Clustering with Multiple Sensitive Att…

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We consider the problem of deep fair clustering, which partitions data into clusters via the representations extracted by deep neural networks while hiding sensitive data attributes. To achieve fairness, existing methods present a variety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Xiang Zhang

Given their widespread usage in the real world, the fairness of clustering methods has become of major interest. Theoretical results on fair clustering show that fairness enjoys transitivity: given a set of small and fair clusters, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Mattia Setzu , Riccardo Guidotti

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Connor Lawless , Oktay Gunluk

Fair clustering under the disparate impact doctrine requires that population of each protected group should be approximately equal in every cluster. Previous work investigated a difficult-to-scale pre-processing step for $k$-center and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Bokun Wang , Ian Davidson

We revisit the problem of fair clustering, first introduced by Chierichetti et al., that requires each protected attribute to have approximately equal representation in every cluster; i.e., a balance property. Existing solutions to fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Shivam Gupta , Ganesh Ghalme , Narayanan C. Krishnan , Shweta Jain

Center-based clustering (e.g., $k$-means, $k$-medians) and clustering using linear subspaces are two most popular techniques to partition real-world data into smaller clusters. However, when the data consists of sensitive demographic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Sruthi Gorantla , Kishen N. Gowda , Amit Deshpande , Anand Louis

In this paper, we study the problem of fair clustering on the $k-$center objective. In fair clustering, the input is $N$ points, each belonging to at least one of $l$ protected groups, e.g. male, female, Asian, Hispanic. The objective is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Elfarouk Harb , Ho Shan Lam

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

Promoting fairness for deep clustering models in unsupervised clustering settings to reduce demographic bias is a challenging goal. This is because of the limitation of large-scale balanced data with well-annotated labels for sensitive or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Xuan-Bac Nguyen , Chi Nhan Duong , Marios Savvides , Kaushik Roy , Hugh Churchill , Khoa Luu

We show that the popular k-means clustering algorithm (Lloyd's heuristic), used for a variety of scientific data, can result in outcomes that are unfavorable to subgroups of data (e.g., demographic groups). Such biased clusterings can have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Mehrdad Ghadiri , Samira Samadi , Santosh Vempala

Consensus clustering, a fundamental task in machine learning and data analysis, aims to aggregate multiple input clusterings of a dataset, potentially based on different non-sensitive attributes, into a single clustering that best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Diptarka Chakraborty , Kushagra Chatterjee , Debarati Das , Tien Long Nguyen , Romina Nobahari

Fairness in algorithmic decision-making is often framed in terms of individual fairness, which requires that similar individuals receive similar outcomes. A system violates individual fairness if there exists a pair of inputs differing only…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ranit Debnath Akash , Ashish Kumar , Verya Monjezi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Gang , Tan , Saeid Tizpaz-Niari

In this paper, we initiate the study of fair clustering that ensures distributional similarity among similar individuals. In response to improving fairness in machine learning, recent papers have investigated fairness in clustering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nihesh Anderson , Suman K. Bera , Syamantak Das , Yang Liu

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

Clustering is a fundamental tool in data mining. It partitions points into groups (clusters) and may be used to make decisions for each point based on its group. However, this process may harm protected (minority) classes if the clustering…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Ioana O. Bercea , Martin Groß , Samir Khuller , Aounon Kumar , Clemens Rösner , Daniel R. Schmidt , Melanie Schmidt

We study fair clustering problems as proposed by Chierichetti et al. (NIPS 2017). Here, points have a sensitive attribute and all clusters in the solution are required to be balanced with respect to it (to counteract any form of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-03-10 Melanie Schmidt , Chris Schwiegelshohn , Christian Sohler

Due to the growing concern about unsavory behaviors of machine learning models toward certain demographic groups, the notion of 'fairness' has recently drawn much attention from the community, thereby motivating the study of fairness in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Minh Phu Vuong , Young-Ju Lee , Iván Ojeda-Ruiz , Chul-Ho Lee

Clustering algorithms are widely utilized for many modern data science applications. This motivates the need to make outputs of clustering algorithms fair. Traditionally, new fair algorithmic variants to clustering algorithms are developed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Anshuman Chhabra , Adish Singla , Prasant Mohapatra

A fair clustering instance is given a data set $A$ in which every point is assigned some color. Colors correspond to various protected attributes such as sex, ethnicity, or age. A fair clustering is an instance where membership of points in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Matteo Böhm , Adriano Fazzone , Stefano Leonardi , Chris Schwiegelshohn