{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/clustering-with-fairness-constraints-a","title":"Variational Fair Clustering","arxiv_id":"1906.08207","date":"2019-06-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Imtiaz Masud Ziko","Eric Granger","Jing Yuan","Ismail Ben Ayed"],"abstract":"We propose a general variational framework of fair clustering, which integrates an original Kullback-Leibler (KL) fairness term with a large class of clustering objectives, including prototype or graph based. Fundamentally different from the existing combinatorial and spectral solutions, our variational multi-term approach enables to control the trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. We derive a general tight upper bound based on a concave-convex decomposition of our fairness term, its Lipschitz-gradient property and the Pinsker's inequality. Our tight upper bound can be jointly optimized with various clustering objectives, while yielding a scalable solution, with convergence guarantee. Interestingly, at each iteration, it performs an independent update for each assignment variable. Therefore, it can be easily distributed for large-scale datasets. This scalability is important as it enables to explore different trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. Unlike spectral relaxation, our formulation does not require computing its eigenvalue decomposition. We report comprehensive evaluations and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods over various fair-clustering benchmarks, which show that our variational formulation can yield highly competitive solutions in terms of fairness and clustering objectives.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08207v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08207v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"clustering-with-fairness-constraints-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/imtiazziko/Clustering-with-fairness-constraints","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"clustering-with-fairness-constraints-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/imtiazziko/variational-fair-clustering","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}