{"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/fair-k-means-clustering","title":"Socially Fair k-Means Clustering","arxiv_id":"2006.10085","date":"2020-06-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mehrdad Ghadiri","Samira Samadi","Santosh Vempala"],"abstract":"We show that the popular k-means clustering algorithm (Lloyd's heuristic), used for a variety of scientific data, can result in outcomes that are unfavorable to subgroups of data (e.g., demographic groups). Such biased clusterings can have deleterious implications for human-centric applications such as resource allocation. We present a fair k-means objective and algorithm to choose cluster centers that provide equitable costs for different groups. The algorithm, Fair-Lloyd, is a modification of Lloyd's heuristic for k-means, inheriting its simplicity, efficiency, and stability. In comparison with standard Lloyd's, we find that on benchmark datasets, Fair-Lloyd exhibits unbiased performance by ensuring that all groups have equal costs in the output k-clustering, while incurring a negligible increase in running time, thus making it a viable fair option wherever k-means is currently used.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10085v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.10085v2.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":"fair-k-means-clustering","repo_url":"https://github.com/fairkmeans/Fair-K-Means-Clustering","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"fair-k-means-clustering","repo_url":"https://github.com/samirasamadi/SociallyFairKMeans","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"k-means-clustering","method_name":"k-Means Clustering"}],"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}