Abstract We propose an efficient algorithm to solve inverse problems in the presence of binary clustered datasets. We consider the paradigmatic Hopfield model in a teacher student scenario, where this situation is found in the retrieval phase. This problem has been widely analyzed through various methods such as mean-field approaches or the pseudo-likelihood optimization. Our approach is based on the estimation of the posterior using the Thouless–Anderson–Palmer (TAP) equations in a parallel updating scheme. Unlike other methods, it allows to retrieve the original patterns of the teacher dataset and thanks to the parallel update it can be applied to large system sizes. We tackle the same problem using a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) and discuss analogies and differences between our algorithm and RBM learning.