Abstract
Fair clustering has traditionally focused on ensuring equitable group
representation or equalizing group-specific clustering costs. However,
Dickerson et al. (2025) recently showed that these fairness notions may yield
undesirable or unintuitive clustering outcomes and advocated for a
welfare-centric clustering approach that models the utilities of the groups. In
this work, we model group utilities based on both distances and proportional
representation and formalize two optimization objectives based on
welfare-centric clustering: the Rawlsian (Egalitarian) objective and the
Utilitarian objective. We introduce novel algorithms for both objectives and
prove theoretical guarantees for them. Empirical evaluations on multiple
real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform
existing fair clustering baselines.
Abstract
Monitoring cattle health and optimizing yield are key challenges faced by
dairy farmers due to difficulties in tracking all animals on the farm. This
work aims to showcase modern data-driven farming practices based on explainable
machine learning(ML) methods that explain the activity and behaviour of dairy
cattle (cows). Continuous data collection of 3-axis accelerometer sensors and
usage of robust ML methodologies and algorithms, provide farmers and
researchers with actionable information on cattle activity, allowing farmers to
make informed decisions and incorporate sustainable practices. This study
utilizes Bluetooth-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices and 4G networks for
seamless data transmission, immediate analysis, inference generation, and
explains the models performance with explainability frameworks. Special
emphasis is put on the pre-processing of the accelerometers time series data,
including the extraction of statistical characteristics, signal processing
techniques, and lag-based features using the sliding window technique. Various
hyperparameter-optimized ML models are evaluated across varying window lengths
for activity classification. The k-nearest neighbour Classifier achieved the
best performance, with AUC of mean 0.98 and standard deviation of 0.0026 on the
training set and 0.99 on testing set). In order to ensure transparency,
Explainable AI based frameworks such as SHAP is used to interpret feature
importance that can be understood and used by practitioners. A detailed
comparison of the important features, along with the stability analysis of
selected features, supports development of explainable and practical ML models
for sustainable livestock management.