I have a task where I need to take "data points" which consist of collections of items. Each item needs to be categorised according to predefined categories. That's the easy part - my solution is to train a deep neural network with cross entropy loss. By the way, the reason I don't classify each item separately is because they acquire their meaning when they come together as a set.
The hard part is that each of these items also have a cluster label. Each cluster can only have items of one category in it, and there can be any number of clusters. Unsupervised clustering methods (applied after the neural network does the categorisation) work fairly well, but not well-enough for my needs. I'd like to:
A. Make use of the fact that I have the ground truth labelling for these clusters
B. Leverage my deep neural network because a lot of the "reasoning" required to solve the classification task will be conducive to the clustering task.
Answers which address at least one of those are useful to me.
EDIT
I realised I might be confusing people with this concept of cluster "labels". To clarify, this is no different than the standard way a classical unsupervised clustering algorithm might return its results. If I have N data points and feed them to a clustering algo, the algo might return N labels, one for each data point, and each of which are integers in [0, C-1] where C is the number of clusters. In my example we have the labels for a training dataset and want to make use of them during training. We cannot use softmax + cross-entropy loss because the cluster labels are permutation invariant.
