Fair Clustering for Data Summarization: Improved Approximation Algorithms and Complexity Insights
Ameet Gadekar, Aristides Gionis, Suhas Thejaswi · 2025
Data summarization tasks are often modeled as k-clustering problems, where the goal is to choose k data points, called cluster centers, that best represent the dataset by minimizing a clustering objective. A popular objective is to minimize the maximum distance between any data point and its nearest center, which is formalized as the k-center problem. While in some applications all data points can be chosen as centers, in the general setting, centers must be chosen from a predefined subset of points, referred as facilities or suppliers; this is known as the k-supplier problem. In this work, we focus on fair data summarization modeled as the fair k-supplier problem, where data consists of several groups, and a minimum number of centers must be selected from each group while minimizing the k-supplier objective. The groups can be disjoint or overlapping, leading to two distinct problem variants each with different computational complexity.