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Related papers: The Fairness-Quality Trade-off in Clustering

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As multi-task models gain popularity in a wider range of machine learning applications, it is becoming increasingly important for practitioners to understand the fairness implications associated with those models. Most existing fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Yuyan Wang , Xuezhi Wang , Alex Beutel , Flavien Prost , Jilin Chen , Ed H. Chi

The fairness-accuracy trade-off is a key challenge in NLP tasks. Current work focuses on finding a single "optimal" solution to balance the two objectives, which is limited considering the diverse solutions on the Pareto front. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Yongkang Du , Jieyu Zhao , Yijun Yang , Tianyi Zhou

Optimization problems have been the subject of statistical physics approximations. A specially relevant and general scenario is provided by optimization methods considering tradeoffs between cost and efficiency, where optimal solutions…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-09-16 Luís F. Seoane , Ricard V. Solé

At the heart of both lossy compression and clustering is a trade-off between the fidelity and size of the learned representation. Our goal is to map out and study the Pareto frontier that quantifies this trade-off. We focus on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-29 Andrew K. Tan , Max Tegmark , Isaac L. Chuang

Algorithmic fairness in clustering aims to balance the proportions of instances assigned to each cluster with respect to a given sensitive attribute. While recently developed fair clustering algorithms optimize clustering objectives under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Kunwoong Kim , Jihu Lee , Sangchul Park , Yongdai Kim

We study the question of fair clustering under the {\em disparate impact} doctrine, where each protected class must have approximately equal representation in every cluster. We formulate the fair clustering problem under both the $k$-center…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Flavio Chierichetti , Ravi Kumar , Silvio Lattanzi , Sergei Vassilvitskii

The advent of ML-driven decision-making and policy formation has led to an increasing focus on algorithmic fairness. As clustering is one of the most commonly used unsupervised machine learning approaches, there has naturally been a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Abhisek Chakraborty , Anirban Bhattacharya , Debdeep Pati

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-04 Suyun Liu , Luis Nunes Vicente

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Tai Le Quy , Arjun Roy , Gunnar Friege , Eirini Ntoutsi

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

Recent discussion in the public sphere about algorithmic classification has involved tension between competing notions of what it means for a probabilistic classification to be fair to different groups. We formalize three fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-18 Jon Kleinberg , Sendhil Mullainathan , Manish Raghavan

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

Classification, recommendation, and ranking problems often involve competing goals with additional constraints (e.g., to satisfy fairness or diversity criteria). Such optimization problems are quite challenging, often involving non-convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Gurpreet Singh , Soumyajit Gupta , Matthew Lease , Clint Dawson

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 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

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

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…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Deepak P

Motivated by a plethora of practical examples where bias is induced by automated-decision making algorithms, there has been strong recent interest in the design of fair algorithms. However, there is often a dichotomy between fairness and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-13 April Niu , Agnes Totschnig , Adrian Vetta

We study fairness-accuracy tradeoffs when a single predictive model must serve multiple demographic groups. A useful tool for understanding this tradeoff is the fairness-accuracy (FA) Pareto frontier, which characterizes the set of models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan , Annie Ulichney