Fair Associative Co-clustering

Co-clustering is a powerful data mining tool that extracts summary information from a data matrix, by simultaneously computing row and column clusters that provide a compact representation of the data. However, if the matrix contains data about individuals, the co-clustering results may be influenced by the societal biases that are reproduced in the data. Consequently, subsequent tasks such as recommendation systems may also be influenced by these biases, thereby compromising the fairness and integrity of the overall knowledge discovery or machine learning process. Despite the extensive research on fairness considerations in clustering, this issue has not been addressed in the context of co-clustering algorithms. In addressing this critical gap in the literature, this paper proposes a novel fair co-clustering algorithm. The proposed algorithm is based on an associative measure derived from the Goodman-Kruskal’s tau, which has demonstrated good convergence properties. This ensures optimal clustering and fairness performance by implementing an in-process rebalancing mechanism inspired by the fair assignment problem. An extensive experimental validation is provided to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, also in comparison to a state-of-the-art method that uses co-clustering for fair recommendation.