提出可调控公平性与聚类质量的高效算法,支持大规模数据秒级处理。
Fast and effective algorithms for fair clustering at scale

- 基于通用框架设计三种启发式算法,灵活控制公平性与聚类成本的权衡。
- 在百万级数据上实现秒级求解,相较现有方法提升效率与质量。
- 适用于客户、员工等涉及个体公平性的实际场景,代码开源可复现。
聚类是无监督机器学习任务,旨在识别相似对象的群体,广泛应用于客户、员工、学生等个体代表的公平敏感领域。本文解决受保护群体成员的公平聚类问题:将对象划分为预设数量的簇,同时确保每个受保护群体在各簇中均有足够代表性,目标是最小化对象到所属簇中心的平方欧氏距离之和。由于聚类成本与公平性常存在冲突,如何管理二者权衡至关重要。现有方法对权衡控制有限,或难以扩展至大数据集,或虽可扩展但解的质量低。本文提出一个通用公平聚类框架,并设计三种基于该框架的启发式算法:第一种侧重解的质量与额外约束的兼容性;第二种兼顾高解质量与可扩展性;第三种专为最大可扩展性设计,在数秒内完成百万级对象的聚类。在基准数据集上的全面实验表明,所提方法优于现有方案。代码与实验复现指南已公开于GitHub。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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 customers, employees, or students. We address a fair clustering problem in which objects belong to protected groups. The problem consists of partitioning the objects into a predefined number of clusters while attaining a user-defined target level of fairness, meaning that each protected group is sufficiently represented in each cluster. The objective is to minimize the clustering cost, defined as the sum of squared Euclidean distances between the objects and the centers of their clusters. Since clustering cost and fairness are generally in conflict, managing the trade-off between them is essential in practical applications. Existing methods provide limited control over this trade-off and either fail to scale to large datasets or, when they scale, produce low-quality solutions. We propose a general framework for fair clustering that provides precise control over the cost-fairness trade-off and introduce three heuristics based on it. The first heuristic focuses on solution quality and the flexibility to incorporate additional constraints, the second improves scalability while retaining high solution quality, and the third is designed for maximum scalability, producing solutions for instances with millions of objects in seconds. The proposed heuristics outperform existing approaches in comprehensive numerical experiments on benchmark datasets. The source code of our heuristics and instructions for reproducing the experiments are publicly available on GitHub.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。