Linear Programming based Approximation to Individually Fair k-Clustering with Outliers

Abstract: Individual fairness guarantees are often desirable properties to have, but they become hard to formalize when the dataset contains outliers. Here, we investigate the problem of developing an individually fair $k$-means clustering algorithm for datasets that contain outliers. That is, given $n$ points and $k$ centers, we want that for each point which is not an outlier, there must be a center within the $\frac{n}{k}$ nearest neighbours of the given point. While a few of the recent works have looked into individually fair clustering, this is the first work that explores this problem in the presence of outliers for $k$-means clustering. For this purpose, we define and solve a linear program (LP) that helps us identify the outliers. We exclude these outliers from the dataset and apply a rounding algorithm that computes the $k$ centers, such that the fairness constraint of the remaining points is satisfied. We also provide theoretical guarantees that our method leads to a guaranteed approximation of the fair radius as well as the clustering cost. We also demonstrate our techniques empirically on real-world datasets.