Fair Clustering via Hierarchical Fair-Dirichlet Process
This work addresses fairness in clustering for decision-making applications, but it appears incremental as it builds upon existing frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of algorithmic fairness in clustering by proposing a model-based formulation, complementing existing optimization-based approaches.
The advent of ML-driven decision-making and policy formation has led to an increasing focus on algorithmic fairness. As clustering is one of the most commonly used unsupervised machine learning approaches, there has naturally been a proliferation of literature on {\em fair clustering}. A popular notion of fairness in clustering mandates the clusters to be {\em balanced}, i.e., each level of a protected attribute must be approximately equally represented in each cluster. Building upon the original framework, this literature has rapidly expanded in various aspects. In this article, we offer a novel model-based formulation of fair clustering, complementing the existing literature which is almost exclusively based on optimizing appropriate objective functions.