A fair-multicluster approach to clustering of categorical data

In the last few years, the need of preventing classification biases due to race, gender, social status, etc. has increased the interest in designing fair clustering algorithms. The main idea is to ensure that the output of a cluster algorithm is not biased towards or against specific subgroups of th...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Santos Mangudo, Carlos, Heras Martínez, Antonio José
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/72690
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/72690
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Clustering
Fairness
Fair clustering
Categorical data
Estadística
1209 Estadística
Descripción
Sumario:In the last few years, the need of preventing classification biases due to race, gender, social status, etc. has increased the interest in designing fair clustering algorithms. The main idea is to ensure that the output of a cluster algorithm is not biased towards or against specific subgroups of the population. There is a growing specialized literature on this topic, dealing with the problem of clustering numerical data bases. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, there are no previous papers devoted to the problem of fair clustering of pure categorical attributes. In this paper, we show that the Multicluster methodology proposed by Santos and Heras (Interdiscip J Inf Knowl Manag 15:227–246, 2020. https://doi.org/10.28945/4643) for clustering categorical data, can be modified in order to increase the fairness of the clusters. Of course, there is a tradeoff between fairness and efficiency, so that an increase in the fairness objective usually leads to a loss of classification efficiency. Yet it is possible to reach a reasonable compromise between these goals, since the methodology proposed by Santos and Heras (2020) can be easily adapted in order to get homogeneous and fair clusters.