Fair Bayesian Model-Based Clustering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Jihu, Kim, Kunwoong, Kim, Yongdai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Jihu
Kim, Kunwoong
Kim, Yongdai
author_facet Lee, Jihu
Kim, Kunwoong
Kim, Yongdai
contents Fair clustering has become a socially significant task with the advancement of machine learning technologies and the growing demand for trustworthy AI. Group fairness ensures that the proportions of each sensitive group are similar in all clusters. Most existing group-fair clustering methods are based on the $K$-means clustering and thus require the distance between instances and the number of clusters to be given in advance. To resolve this limitation, we propose a fair Bayesian model-based clustering called Fair Bayesian Clustering (FBC). We develop a specially designed prior which puts its mass only on fair clusters, and implement an efficient MCMC algorithm. Advantages of FBC are that it can infer the number of clusters and can be applied to any data type as long as the likelihood is defined (e.g., categorical data). Experiments on real-world datasets show that FBC (i) reasonably infers the number of clusters, (ii) achieves a competitive utility-fairness trade-off compared to existing fair clustering methods, and (iii) performs well on categorical data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12839
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fair Bayesian Model-Based Clustering
Lee, Jihu
Kim, Kunwoong
Kim, Yongdai
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Fair clustering has become a socially significant task with the advancement of machine learning technologies and the growing demand for trustworthy AI. Group fairness ensures that the proportions of each sensitive group are similar in all clusters. Most existing group-fair clustering methods are based on the $K$-means clustering and thus require the distance between instances and the number of clusters to be given in advance. To resolve this limitation, we propose a fair Bayesian model-based clustering called Fair Bayesian Clustering (FBC). We develop a specially designed prior which puts its mass only on fair clusters, and implement an efficient MCMC algorithm. Advantages of FBC are that it can infer the number of clusters and can be applied to any data type as long as the likelihood is defined (e.g., categorical data). Experiments on real-world datasets show that FBC (i) reasonably infers the number of clusters, (ii) achieves a competitive utility-fairness trade-off compared to existing fair clustering methods, and (iii) performs well on categorical data.
title Fair Bayesian Model-Based Clustering
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12839