Quota Constraints for Diversity Interventions in Subset Selection

Neeraja Abhyankar

Keywords: Subset Selection, Fairness, Submodularity, Matroids, Greedy

TL;DR: To enforce group-wise-minimum diversity in subset selection, we can be greedy and expect things to work as well as they do for matroidal constraints.

Abstract: The combinatorial optimization problem of subset selection is often modeled as maximizing a set function that captures inter-element dependencies under some capacity/matroid constraints. In this paper, we examine this problem under “quota constraints” where the selected subset must meet some minimum group-wise quotas. We provide algorithms with guarantees for two popular scenarios extended to the quota-constrained setting and make an empirical case for their applicability to fair subset selection.