Apparatuses and methods in a communication system are disclosed. In a network element, an encoder module obtains as an input network data that is representative of the current condition of the communications network, the network data comprising a plurality of values indicative of the performance of network elements and performs (800) feature reduction providing at its output a set of activations. A clustering module performs (802) batch normalisation and an amplitude limitation to the output of the encoder module to obtain normalised activations. A clustering control module calculates a projection of the normalised activations and determines (804) a clustering loss. A decoder module calculates (806) a reconstruction loss. The network element backpropagates the reconstruction loss and the clustering loss through the modules.