Towards Fairer Centroids in K-means Clustering

Abstract

There has been much recent interest in developing fair clustering algorithms that seek to do justice to the representation of groups defined along sensitive attributes such as race and sex. Within the centroid clustering paradigm, these algorithms are seen to generate clusterings where different groups are disadvantaged within different clusters with respect to their representativity, i.e., distance to centroid. In view of this deficiency, we propose a novel notion of cluster-level centroid fairness that targets the representativity unfairness borne by groups within each cluster, along with a metric to quantify the same. Towards operationalising this notion, we draw on ideas from political philosophy aligned with consideration for the worst-off group to develop Fair-Centroid; a new clustering method that focusses on enhancing the representativity of the worst-off group within each cluster. Our method uses an iterative optimisation paradigm wherein an initial cluster assignment is refined by reassigning objects to clusters such that the worst-off group in each cluster is benefitted. We compare our notion with a related fairness notion and show through extensive empirical evaluations on real-world datasets that our method significantly enhances cluster-level centroid fairness at low impact on cluster coherence.