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

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There has been much interest recently in developing fair clustering algorithms that seek to do justice to the representation of groups defined along sensitive attributes such as race and gender. We observe that clustering algorithms could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Stanley Simoes , Deepak P , Muiris MacCarthaigh

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

Algorithmic fairness has become a central concern in computational decision-making systems, where ensuring equitable outcomes is essential for both ethical and legal reasons. Two dominant notions of fairness have emerged in the literature:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sandra Benítez-Peña , Blas Kolic , Victoria Menendez , Belén Pulido

A trade-off between accuracy and fairness is almost taken as a given in the existing literature on fairness in machine learning. Yet, it is not preordained that accuracy should decrease with increased fairness. Novel to this work, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-14 Sanghamitra Dutta , Dennis Wei , Hazar Yueksel , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu , Kush R. Varshney

As algorithmic decision-making systems are becoming more pervasive, it is crucial to ensure such systems do not become mechanisms of unfair discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Moreover, due to the inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Mohammad Mahdi Kamani , Rana Forsati , James Z. Wang , Mehrdad Mahdavi

Across machine learning (ML) sub-disciplines, researchers make explicit mathematical assumptions in order to facilitate proof-writing. We note that, specifically in the area of fairness-accuracy trade-off optimization scholarship, similar…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-09-09 A. Feder Cooper , Ellen Abrams

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

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

The potential for learned models to amplify existing societal biases has been broadly recognized. Fairness-aware classifier constraints, which apply equality metrics of performance across subgroups defined on sensitive attributes such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Ananth Balashankar , Alyssa Lees , Chris Welty , Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

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

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

Solutions to multi-objective optimization problems can generally not be compared or ordered, due to the lack of orderability of the single objectives. Furthermore, decision-makers are often made to believe that scaled objectives can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-31 Sebastian Hönel , Welf Löwe

Optimizing NLP models for fairness poses many challenges. Lack of differentiable fairness measures prevents gradient-based loss training or requires surrogate losses that diverge from the true metric of interest. In addition, competing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Soumyajit Gupta , Venelin Kovatchev , Anubrata Das , Maria De-Arteaga , Matthew Lease

Current approaches to group fairness in federated learning assume the existence of predefined and labeled sensitive groups during training. However, due to factors ranging from emerging regulations to dynamics and location-dependency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Afroditi Papadaki , Natalia Martinez , Martin Bertran , Guillermo Sapiro , Miguel Rodrigues

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

Motivated by fairness concerns, we study the `portfolio problem': given an optimization problem with set $D$ of feasible solutions, a class $\mathbf{C}$ of fairness objective functions on $D$, and an approximation factor $\alpha \ge 1$, a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Swati Gupta , Jai Moondra , Mohit Singh

We propose a general variational framework of fair clustering, which integrates an original Kullback-Leibler (KL) fairness term with a large class of clustering objectives, including prototype or graph based. Fundamentally different from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Imtiaz Masud Ziko , Eric Granger , Jing Yuan , Ismail Ben Ayed

Real-world applications of machine learning tools in high-stakes domains are often regulated to be fair, in the sense that the predicted target should satisfy some quantitative notion of parity with respect to a protected attribute.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Han Zhao , Geoffrey J. Gordon

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

Fair clustering is the process of grouping similar entities together, while satisfying a mathematically well-defined fairness metric as a constraint. Due to the practical challenges in precise model specification, the prescribed fairness…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-09 Sainyam Galhotra , Sandhya Saisubramanian , Shlomo Zilberstein