iFiG: Individually Fair Multi-view Graph Clustering

Yian Wang, Jian Kang, Yinglong Xia, Jiebo Luo, Hanghang Tong

Abstract: In a connected world, fair graph learning is becoming increasingly important because of the growing concerns about bias. Yet, the vast majority of existing works assume that the input graph comes from a single view while ignoring the multi-view essence of graphs. Generally speaking, the bias in graph mining is often rooted in the input graph and is further introduced or even amplified by the graph mining model. It thus poses critical research questions regarding the intrinsic relationships of fairness on different views and the possibility of mitigating bias on multiple views simultaneously. To answer these questions, in this paper, we explore individual fairness in multi-view graph mining. We first demonstrate the necessity of fair multi-view graph learning. Building upon the optimization perspective of fair single-view graph mining, we then formulate our problem as a linear weighted optimization problem. In order to figure out the weight of each view, we resort to the minimax Pareto fairness, which is closely related to the Rawlsian difference principle, and propose an effective solver named iFiG that minimizes the utility loss while promoting individual fairness for each view with two different instantiations. The extensive experiments that we conduct in the application of multi-view spectral clustering and INFORM post-processing demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method in individual bias mitigation.