扩展公平聚类至多群体场景,提出高效近似算法。
Generalizing Fair Clustering to Multiple Groups: Algorithms and Applications
- 将公平聚类从两组推广到任意多组,设计近线性时间算法。
- 证明多组公平聚类问题在等规模下仍为NP难,突破已有结果。
- 首次解决多组公平共识聚类,适用于多元属性公平分析。
聚类是机器学习和数据分析中的基础任务,但常无法对由多个受保护属性定义的边缘化群体提供公平表示,这通常源于训练数据中的偏差。因此,亟需增强聚类结果的公平性,理想情况是仅作最小修改,甚至作为传统聚类后的后处理步骤。近期,Chakraborty 等人(COLT'25)首次研究了‘最近公平聚类’问题,但仅限于两点属于两个组的情形。实践中,数据点通常由多种群体特征刻画,如年龄、种族、性别等。本文将‘最近公平聚类’问题推广至任意数量(超过两个)的群体。首先,我们证明即使所有组大小相等,该问题仍是NP难的——与两组情形存在确切算法形成鲜明对比。随后,我们提出可在近线性时间内处理任意大小多组的近似算法,回答了Chakraborty等人提出的开放问题。基于我们的最近公平聚类算法,进一步改进了‘公平相关聚类’的近似保证,超越了Ahmadian等(AISTATS'20)及Ahmadi等(2020)的最先进成果。此外,我们首次为涉及多个(超过两个)群体的‘公平共识聚类’问题提供了近似算法,解决了Chakraborty等人指出的另一开放方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Clustering is a fundamental task in machine learning and data analysis, but it frequently fails to provide fair representation for various marginalized communities defined by multiple protected attributes -- a shortcoming often caused by biases in the training data. As a result, there is a growing need to enhance the fairness of clustering outcomes, ideally by making minimal modifications, possibly as a post-processing step after conventional clustering. Recently, Chakraborty et al. [COLT'25] initiated the study of \emph{closest fair clustering}, though in a restricted scenario where data points belong to only two groups. In practice, however, data points are typically characterized by many groups, reflecting diverse protected attributes such as age, ethnicity, gender, etc. In this work, we generalize the study of the \emph{closest fair clustering} problem to settings with an arbitrary number (more than two) of groups. We begin by showing that the problem is NP-hard even when all groups are of equal size -- a stark contrast with the two-group case, for which an exact algorithm exists. Next, we propose near-linear time approximation algorithms that efficiently handle arbitrary-sized multiple groups, thereby answering an open question posed by Chakraborty et al. [COLT'25]. Leveraging our closest fair clustering algorithms, we further achieve improved approximation guarantees for the \emph{fair correlation clustering} problem, advancing the state-of-the-art results established by Ahmadian et al. [AISTATS'20] and Ahmadi et al. [2020]. Additionally, we are the first to provide approximation algorithms for the \emph{fair consensus clustering} problem involving multiple (more than two) groups, thus addressing another open direction highlighted by Chakraborty et al. [COLT'25].
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