A New Notion of Individually Fair Clustering: α-Equitable k-Center
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Clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised machine learning, and fair variants of it have recently received significant attention. In this work we introduce a novel definition of fairness for clustering problems. Specifically, in our model each point j has a set of other points 𝒮_j that it perceives as similar to itself, and it feels that it is fairly treated, if the quality of service it receives in the solution is α-close to that of the points in 𝒮_j. We begin our study by answering questions regarding the structure of the problem, namely for what values of α the problem is well-defined, and what the behavior of the Price of Fairness (PoF) for it is. For the well-defined region of α, we provide efficient and easily implementable approximation algorithms for the k-center objective, which in certain cases also enjoy bounded PoF guarantees. We finally complement our analysis by an extensive suite of experiments that validates the effectiveness of our theoretical results.
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