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Related papers: Feature-based Individual Fairness in k-Clustering

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Clustering, a fundamental activity in unsupervised learning, is notoriously difficult when the feature space is high-dimensional. Fortunately, in many realistic scenarios, only a handful of features are relevant in distinguishing clusters.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-23 Zhiyue Zhang , Kenneth Lange , Jason Xu

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

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

We study the problem of finding low-cost Fair Clusterings in data where each data point may belong to many protected groups. Our work significantly generalizes the seminal work of Chierichetti et.al. (NIPS 2017) as follows. - We allow the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Suman K. Bera , Deeparnab Chakrabarty , Nicolas J. Flores , Maryam Negahbani

We study the computational problem of computing a fair means clustering of discrete vectors, which admits an equivalent formulation as editing a colored matrix into one with few distinct color-balanced rows by changing at most $k$ values.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Robert Ganian , Hung P. Hoang , Simon Wietheger

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

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

Federated Learning (FL) has been a pivotal paradigm for collaborative training of machine learning models across distributed datasets. In heterogeneous settings, it has been observed that a single shared FL model can lead to low local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Yifan Yang , Ali Payani , Parinaz Naghizadeh

We initiate the study of multi-attribute group fairness in $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) search over vector databases. Unlike prior work that optimizes efficiency or query filtering, fairness imposes count constraints to ensure proportional…

Databases · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Thinh On , Senjuti Basu Roy , Baruch Schieber

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

Center-based clustering has attracted significant research interest from both theory and practice. In many practical applications, input data often contain background knowledge that can be used to improve clustering results. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Longkun Guo , Chaoqi Jia , Kewen Liao , Zhigang Lu , Minhui Xue

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

Clustering is a long-standing research problem and a fundamental tool in AI and data analysis. The traditional k-center problem, a fundamental theoretical challenge in clustering, has a best possible approximation ratio of 2, and any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Chaoqi Jia , Longkun Guo , Kewen Liao , Zhigang Lu , Chao Chen , Jason Xue

We study fair clustering problems in a setting where distance information is obtained from two sources: a strong oracle providing exact distances, but at a high cost, and a weak oracle providing potentially inaccurate distance estimates at…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Vladimir Braverman , Prathamesh Dharangutte , Shaofeng H. -C. Jiang , Hoai-An Nguyen , Chen Wang , Yubo Zhang , Samson Zhou

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

Given the widespread popularity of spectral clustering (SC) for partitioning graph data, we study a version of constrained SC in which we try to incorporate the fairness notion proposed by Chierichetti et al. (2017). According to this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-14 Matthäus Kleindessner , Samira Samadi , Pranjal Awasthi , Jamie Morgenstern

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

We study streaming algorithms for proportionally fair clustering, a notion originally suggested by Chierichetti et. al. (2017), in the sliding window model. We show that although there exist efficient streaming algorithms in the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Vincent Cohen-Addad , Shaofeng H. -C. Jiang , Qiaoyuan Yang , Yubo Zhang , Samson Zhou

We consider the classical $k$-means clustering problem in the setting bi-criteria approximation, in which an algoithm is allowed to output $\beta k > k$ clusters, and must produce a clustering with cost at most $\alpha$ times the to the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-08-04 Konstantin Makarychev , Yury Makarychev , Maxim Sviridenko , Justin Ward

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