Fair k-center Clustering with Outliers

The importance of dealing with big data is further increasing, as machine learning (ML) systems obtain useful knowledge from big datasets. However, using all data is practically prohibitive because of the massive sizes of the datasets, so summarizing them by centers obtained from k-center clustering is a promising approach. We have two concerns here. One is fairness, because if the summary does not have some specific groups, subsequent applications may provide unfair results for the groups. The other is the presence of outliers, and if outliers dominate the summary, it cannot be useful. To overcome these concerns, we address the problem of fair k-center clustering with outliers. Although prior works studied the fair k-center clustering problem, they do not consider outliers. This paper yields a linear time algorithm that satisfies the fairness constraint of our problem and probabilistically guarantees the almost 3-approximation bound. Its empirical efficiency and effectiveness are also reported.