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Related papers: Fair Clustering Under a Bounded Cost

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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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 John Dickerson , Seyed A. Esmaeili , Jamie Morgenstern , Claire Jie Zhang

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

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

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

What does it mean for a clustering to be fair? One popular approach seeks to ensure that each cluster contains groups in (roughly) the same proportion in which they exist in the population. The normative principle at play is balance: any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Mohsen Abbasi , Aditya Bhaskara , Suresh Venkatasubramanian

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

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

Research in fair machine learning, and particularly clustering, has been crucial in recent years given the many ethical controversies that modern intelligent systems have posed. Ahmadian et al. [2020] established the study of fairness in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Marina Knittel , Max Springer , John Dickerson , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi

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 is a constrained variant of clustering where the goal is to partition a set of colored points, such that the fraction of points of any color in every cluster is more or less equal to the fraction of points of this color in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Sayan Bandyapadhyay , Fedor V. Fomin , Kirill Simonov

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 $n/k$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Xingyu Chen , Brandon Fain , Liang Lyu , Kamesh Munagala

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

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

Fairness in clustering has been considered extensively in the past; however, the trade-off between the two objectives -- e.g., can we sacrifice just a little in the quality of the clustering to significantly increase fairness, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Rashida Hakim , Ana-Andreea Stoica , Christos H. Papadimitriou , Mihalis Yannakakis

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

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

Clustering is a fundamental building block of modern statistical analysis pipelines. Fair clustering has seen much attention from the machine learning community in recent years. We are some of the first to study fairness in the context of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Marina Knittel , Max Springer , John P. Dickerson , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi

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

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