I have a task to cluster an almost entirely unlabelled dataset. After reading the literature on semi-supervised clustering, I have not found any algorithms that suit my very particular needs.
Basically I have one true class A for which we have all samples, i.e. if something is labelled A it's definitely A, and if an object is not labelled A then it's definitely not A. This is the extent of the true labels.
Then I have an unknown number of other classes. There are some objects that I know must belong in the same class. For instance, I may know objects 1, 2 and 4 are of the same class, and objects 3, 5 and 6 are of the same class, but they could also all actually be one big class - that is unknown.
I also know some objects that cannot be in the same class. For instance, I may know objects 1 and 3 cannot be in the same class. Combined with above information I would have identified two definitely distinct classes B and C.
I am thinking of trying to construct a distance matrix with distances 0 or near zero between objects that I'm sure are in the same class, and very large distances between objects I'm sure are not in the same class, then use Euclidean distance between object features determine all other distances. Then I plan to use hierarchical clustering on this distance matrix. (So if object 7 was close to object 3 in the feature space, then we could cluster that in as class C too).
Would anyone happen to know any other methods to incorporate such information into a clustering? Or alternatively have any critiques of what I've proposed thus far?