在构建图结构时加入公平性约束,让聚类结果更公正。
Incorporating Fairness in Neighborhood Graphs for Fair Spectral Clustering
- 在构建kNN和ε邻域图时加入公平性约束,确保敏感群体比例均衡。
- 实验显示在3个合成数据集、7个表格数据集和3个图像数据集上均优于基线方法。
- 无需修改聚类算法,仅通过图构造即可实现更公平的聚类结果,适合公平学习研究者。
图聚类在谱聚类等无监督学习方法中起关键作用,但传统图构造方法常因不公平的图构建而加剧偏见,导致某些群体被低估。本文提出新的公平k近邻(kNN)与公平ε-邻域图构造方法,在图构建阶段主动引入性别平等约束。通过在邻域选择阶段嵌入敏感特征的成比例表示,既保持几何一致性,又确保每个节点的局部邻域中敏感群体有合理代表。研究表明,现有常用方法如kNN和ε-邻域图会因基于边的差异影响传播,对敏感群体产生偏差。在每个节点的邻域中保证敏感群体的代表性,能使图的拓扑结构自然反映公平的群体比例,从而提升谱聚类的公平性。本工作填补了公平无监督学习中的预处理空白,证明图构造阶段的拓扑公平性是实现公平聚类结果的关键。在三个合成数据集、七个真实表格数据集和三个真实图像数据集上的大量实验表明,所提方法在图聚类任务中显著优于现有基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Graph clustering plays a pivotal role in unsupervised learning methods like spectral clustering, yet traditional methods for graph clustering often perpetuate bias through unfair graph constructions that may underrepresent some groups. The current research introduces novel approaches for constructing fair k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and fair epsilon-neighborhood graphs that proactively enforce demographic parity during graph formation. By incorporating fairness constraints at the earliest stage of neighborhood selection steps, our approaches incorporate proportional representation of sensitive features into the local graph structure while maintaining geometric consistency.Our work addresses a critical gap in pre-processing for fair spectral clustering, demonstrating that topological fairness in graph construction is essential for achieving equitable clustering outcomes. Widely used graph construction methods like kNN and epsilon-neighborhood graphs propagate edge based disparate impact on sensitive groups, leading to biased clustering results. Providing representation of each sensitive group in the neighborhood of every node leads to fairer spectral clustering results because the topological features of the graph naturally reflect equitable group ratios. This research fills an essential shortcoming in fair unsupervised learning, by illustrating how topological fairness in graph construction inherently facilitates fairer spectral clustering results without the need for changes to the clustering algorithm itself. Thorough experiments on three synthetic datasets, seven real-world tabular datasets, and three real-world image datasets prove that our fair graph construction methods surpass the current baselines in graph clustering tasks.
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