Improved Approximation Algorithms for Individually Fair Clustering

We consider the $k$-clustering problem with $\ell_p$-norm cost, which includes $k$-median, $k$-means and $k$-center cost functions, under an individual notion of fairness proposed by Jung et al. [2020]: given a set of points $P$ of size $n$, a set of $k$ centers induces a fair clustering if for every point $v\in P$, $v$ can find a center among its $n/k$ closest neighbors. Recently, Mahabadi and Vakilian [2020] showed how to get a $(p^{O(p)},7)$-bicriteria approximation for the problem of fair $k$-clustering with $\ell_p$-norm cost: every point finds a center within distance at most $7$ times its distance to its $(n/k)$-th closest neighbor and the $\ell_p$-norm cost of the solution is at most $p^{O(p)}$ times the cost of an optimal fair solution. In this work, for any $\varepsilon>0$, we present an improved $(16^p +\varepsilon,3)$-bicriteria approximation for the fair $k$-clustering with $\ell_p$-norm cost. To achieve our guarantees, we extend the framework of [Charikar et al., 2002, Swamy, 2016] and devise a $16^p$-approximation algorithm for the facility location with $\ell_p$-norm cost under matroid constraint which might be of an independent interest. Besides, our approach suggests a reduction from our individually fair clustering to a clustering with a group fairness requirement proposed by Kleindessner et al. [2019], which is essentially the median matroid problem [Krishnaswamy et al., 2011].