Unsupervised, Unaware, Unfair: When Your Embedding Knows Too Much
Opening — Why This Matters Now Businesses love unsupervised learning. It feels clean. Neutral. Almost innocent. Cluster customers. Visualize behavior. Compress features before feeding them into a model. And if you simply remove age, gender, race, or income from the dataset, surely the system cannot discriminate. That assumption — “fairness through unawareness” — is precisely what this paper dismantles. ...