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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 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

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

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

Correlation clustering is a ubiquitous paradigm in unsupervised machine learning where addressing unfairness is a major challenge. Motivated by this, we study Fair Correlation Clustering where the data points may belong to different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Sara Ahmadian , Maryam Negahbani

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

In clustering problems, a central decision-maker is given a complete metric graph over vertices and must provide a clustering of vertices that minimizes some objective function. In fair clustering problems, vertices are endowed with a color…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Brian Brubach , Leonidas Tsepenekas , John P. Dickerson

Clustering is a well-studied unsupervised learning task that aims to partition data points into a number of clusters. In many applications, these clusters correspond to real-world constructs (e.g., electoral districts, playlists, TV…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-25 Connor Lawless , Oktay Gunluk

Many approximation algorithms and heuristic algorithms to find a fair clustering have emerged. In this paper we define a new and natural variant of fair clustering problem and design a polynomial time algorithm to compute an optimal fair…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Ayano Moritaka , Shin-ichi Nakano , Kento Tanaka , Noriaki Yoshida

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

Fair clustering has become a socially significant task with the advancement of machine learning technologies and the growing demand for trustworthy AI. Group fairness ensures that the proportions of each sensitive group are similar in all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-17 Jihu Lee , Kunwoong Kim , Yongdai Kim

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

The goal of fair clustering is to find clusters such that the proportion of sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, etc.) in each cluster is similar to that of the entire dataset. Various fair clustering algorithms have been proposed that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-26 Jinwon Park , Kunwoong Kim , Jihu Lee , Yongdai Kim

In recent years, there has been a surge in effort to formalize notions of fairness in machine learning. We focus on centroid clustering--one of the fundamental tasks in unsupervised machine learning. We propose a new axiom ``proportionally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Haris Aziz , Barton E. Lee , Sean Morota Chu , Jeremy Vollen

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

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 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

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

Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning task that consists of identifying groups of similar objects. It has numerous applications and is increasingly used in fairness-sensitive domains where objects represent individuals, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Claudio Mantuano , Manuel Kammermann , Philipp Baumann

The study of algorithmic fairness received growing attention recently. This stems from the awareness that bias in the input data for machine learning systems may result in discriminatory outputs. For clustering tasks, one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Katrin Casel , Tobias Friedrich , Martin Schirneck , Simon Wietheger