用决策树实现可解释的公平聚类,无需调参且支持多敏感属性。
Interpretable Fair Clustering
- 将公平约束融入决策树结构,实现可解释聚类。
- 在真实与合成数据上表现优于基线,公平性提升显著。
- 无需调参,适合高风险场景中的透明决策需求。
公平聚类近年受到广泛关注,尤其在涉及社会敏感属性的应用中。然而,现有方法常缺乏可解释性,限制了其在高风险场景中的应用。本文提出一种可解释的公平聚类框架,将公平约束嵌入决策树结构,构建既能划分数据又保证受保护群体公平对待的决策树。为进一步提升实用性,还引入无需公平超参数调优的变体:先构建无公平约束的树,再通过后剪枝实现公平性。在真实世界与合成数据集上的大量实验表明,该方法不仅具备竞争力的聚类性能和更优的公平性,还兼具可解释性与多敏感属性处理能力,在复杂公平约束下表现稳健,为公平且透明的聚类提供了新可能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Fair clustering has gained increasing attention in recent years, especially in applications involving socially sensitive attributes. However, existing fair clustering methods often lack interpretability, limiting their applicability in high-stakes scenarios where understanding the rationale behind clustering decisions is essential. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing an interpretable and fair clustering framework, which integrates fairness constraints into the structure of decision trees. Our approach constructs interpretable decision trees that partition the data while ensuring fair treatment across protected groups. To further enhance the practicality of our framework, we also introduce a variant that requires no fairness hyperparameter tuning, achieved through post-pruning a tree constructed without fairness constraints. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method not only delivers competitive clustering performance and improved fairness, but also offers additional advantages such as interpretability and the ability to handle multiple sensitive attributes. These strengths enable our method to perform robustly under complex fairness constraints, opening new possibilities for equitable and transparent clustering.
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