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Related papers: Fair Clustering via Alignment

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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

The popular K-means clustering algorithm potentially suffers from a major weakness for further analysis or interpretation. Some cluster may have disproportionately more (or fewer) points from one of the subpopulations in terms of some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guancheng Zhou , Haiping Xu , Hongkang Xu , Chenyu Li , Donghui Yan

Incorporating fairness constructs into machine learning algorithms is a topic of much societal importance and recent interest. Clustering, a fundamental task in unsupervised learning that manifests across a number of web data scenarios, has…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Deepak P , Savitha Sam Abraham

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

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

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

There are synergies of research interests and industrial efforts in modeling fairness and correcting algorithmic bias in machine learning. In this paper, we present a scalable algorithm for spectral clustering (SC) with group fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Ji Wang , Ding Lu , Ian Davidson , Zhaojun Bai

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

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

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

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

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

Fairness of decision-making algorithms is an increasingly important issue. In this paper, we focus on spectral clustering with group fairness constraints, where every demographic group is represented in each cluster proportionally as in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Francesco Tonin , Alex Lambert , Johan A. K. Suykens , Volkan Cevher

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

Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning problem where a dataset is partitioned into clusters that consist of nearby points in a metric space. A recent variant, fair clustering, associates a color with each point representing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Brian Brubach , Aravind Srinivasan , John P. Dickerson

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

Cluster analysis which focuses on the grouping and categorization of similar elements is widely used in various fields of research. Inspired by the phenomenon of atomic fission, a novel density-based clustering algorithm is proposed in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Shizhan Lu

Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Shengfei Wei , Suyuan Liu , Jun Wang , Ke Liang , Miaomiao Li , Lei Luo

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

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