A Center in Your Neighborhood: Fairness in Facility Location

Abstract: When selecting locations for a set of facilities, standard clustering algorithms may place unfair burden on some individuals and neighborhoods. We formulate a fairness concept that takes local population densities into account. In particular, given $k$ facilities to locate and a population of size $n$, we define the "neighborhood radius" of an individual $i$ as the minimum radius of a ball centered at $i$ that contains at least $n/k$ individuals. Our objective is to ensure that each individual has a facility within at most a small constant factor of her neighborhood radius. We present several theoretical results: We show that optimizing this factor is NP-hard; we give an approximation algorithm that guarantees a factor of at most 2 in all metric spaces; and we prove matching lower bounds in some metric spaces. We apply a variant of this algorithm to real-world address data, showing that it is quite different from standard clustering algorithms and outperforms them on our objective function and balances the load between facilities more evenly.