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Related papers: Welfare-Centric Clustering

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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

Clustering is a fundamental problem in machine learning and operations research. Therefore, given the fact that fairness considerations have become of paramount importance in algorithm design, fairness in clustering has received significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 John Dickerson , Seyed A. Esmaeili , Jamie Morgenstern , Claire Jie Zhang

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

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

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

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

There is a lack of consensus within the literature as to how `fairness' of algorithmic systems can be measured, and different metrics can often be at odds. In this paper, we approach this task by drawing on the ethical frameworks of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Daniel E. Rigobon

Clustering is an unsupervised learning task that aims to partition data into a set of clusters. In many applications, these clusters correspond to real-world constructs (e.g. electoral districts) whose benefit can only be attained by groups…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Connor Lawless , Oktay Gunluk

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

We conduct an exploratory study that looks at incorporating John Rawls' ideas on fairness into existing unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Our focus is on the task of clustering, specifically the k-means clustering algorithm. To the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Stanley Simoes , Deepak P , Muiris MacCarthaigh

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

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 under the disparate impact doctrine requires that population of each protected group should be approximately equal in every cluster. Previous work investigated a difficult-to-scale pre-processing step for $k$-center and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Bokun Wang , Ian Davidson

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

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

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

Now that machine learning algorithms lie at the center of many resource allocation pipelines, computer scientists have been unwittingly cast as partial social planners. Given this state of affairs, important questions follow. What is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-02 Lily Hu , Yiling Chen

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

Clustering algorithms are widely used in many societal resource allocation applications, such as loan approvals and candidate recruitment, among others, and hence, biased or unfair model outputs can adversely impact individuals that rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Anshuman Chhabra , Peizhao Li , Prasant Mohapatra , Hongfu Liu

A clustering may be considered as fair on pre-specified sensitive attributes if the proportions of sensitive attribute groups in each cluster reflect that in the dataset. In this paper, we consider the task of fair clustering for scenarios…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Savitha Sam Abraham , Deepak P , Sowmya S Sundaram