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Looking for a clustering algorithm, that can cluster by density around a centroid, but with a fixed maximum distance cutoff

I currently have a list with 3D coordinates which I want cluster by density into a unknown number of clusters. In addition to that I want to score the clusters by population and by distance to the centroids.
I would also like to be able to set a maximum possible distance from a certain centroid. Ideally the centroid represent a point of the data-set, but it is not absolutely necessary. I want to do this for a list ranging from approximately 100 to 10000 3D coordinates.
So for example, say i have a point [x,y,z] which could be my centroid:
Points that are closest to x,y,z should contribute the most to its score (i.e. a logistic scoring function like y = (1 + exp(4*(-1.0+x)))** -1 ,where x represents the euclidean distance to point [x,y ,z]
( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+%2B+exp(4(-1.0%2Bx)))**+-1 )
Since this function never reaches 0, it is needed to set a maximum distance, e.g. 2 distance units to set a limit to the cluster.
I want to do this until no more clusters can be made, I am only interested in the centroid, thus it should preferably be a real datapoint instead of an interpolated one it also has other properties connected to it.
I have already tried DBSCAN from sklearn, which is several orders of magnitude faster than my code, but it does obviously not accomplish what I want to do
Currently I am just calculating the proximity of every point relative to all other points and am scoring every point by the number and distance to its neighbors (with the same scoring function discussed above), then I take the highest scored point and remove all other, lower scored, points that are within a certain cutoff distance. It gets the job done and is accurate, but it is too slow.
I hope I could be somewhat clear with what I want to do.

Use the neighbor search function of sklearn to find points within the maximum distance 2 fast. Only do this once compute the logistic weights only once.
Then do the remainder using ony this precomputed data?

How to define a range of values for the eps parameter of sklearn.cluster.DBSCAN?

I want to use DBSCAN with the metric sklearn.metrics.pairwise.cosine_similarity to cluster points that have cosine similarity close to 1 (i.e. whose vectors (from "the" origin) are parallel or almost parallel).
The issue:
eps is the maximum distance between two samples for them to be considered as in the same neighbourhood by DBSCAN - meaning that if the distance between two points is lower than or equal to eps, these points are considered neighbours;
but
sklearn.metrics.pairwise.cosine_similarity spits out values between -1 and 1 and I want DBSCAN to consider two points to be neighbours if the distance between them is, say, between 0.75 and 1 - i.e. greater than or equal to 0.75.
I see two possible solutions:
pass a range of values to the eps parameter of DBSCAN e.g. eps=[0.75,1]
Pass the value eps=-0.75 to DBSCAN but (somehow) force it to use the negative of the cosine similarities matrix that is spit out by sklearn.metrics.pairwise.cosine_similarity
I do not know how to implement either of these.
Any guidance would be appreciated!

DBSCAN has a metric keyword argument. Docstring:
metric : string, or callable
The metric to use when calculating distance between instances in a
feature array. If metric is a string or callable, it must be one of
the options allowed by metrics.pairwise.calculate_distance for its
metric parameter.
If metric is "precomputed", X is assumed to be a distance matrix and
must be square. X may be a sparse matrix, in which case only "nonzero"
elements may be considered neighbors for DBSCAN.
So probably the easiest thing to do is to precompute a distance matrix using cosine similarity as your distance metric, preprocess the distance matrix such that it fits your bespoke distance criterion (probably something like D = np.abs(np.abs(CD) -1), where CD is your cosine distance matrix), and then set metric to precomputed, and pass the precomputed distance matrix D in for X, i.e. the data.
For example:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import numpy as np
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity
from sklearn.cluster import DBSCAN
total_samples = 1000
dimensionality = 3
points = np.random.rand(total_samples, dimensionality)
cosine_distance = cosine_similarity(points)
# option 1) vectors are close to each other if they are parallel
bespoke_distance = np.abs(np.abs(cosine_distance) -1)
# option 2) vectors are close to each other if they point in the same direction
bespoke_distance = np.abs(cosine_distance - 1)
results = DBSCAN(metric='precomputed', eps=0.25).fit(bespoke_distance)

A) check out Generalized DBSCAN which works fine with similarities too. With cosine, sklearn will supposedly be slow anyway.
B) you can trivially use: cosine distance = 1 - cosine similarity. But that may well cause the sklearn implementation to run in O(n²).
C) you supposedly can even pass -cosinesimilarity as precomputed distance matrix and use -0.75 as eps.
d) just make a binary distance matrix (in O(n²) memory, though, so slow), where distance = 0 of the cosine similarity is larger than your threshold, and 0 otherwise. Then use DBSCAN with eps=0.5. it is trivial to show that distance < eps if and only if similarity > threshold.

A few options:
dist = np.abs(cos_sim - 1) accepted answer here
dist = np.arccos(cos_sim) / np.pi https://math.stackexchange.com/a/3385463/816178
dist = 1 - (sim + 1) / 2 https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3241174/816178
I've found they all work the same in practice for this application (precomputed distances in hierarchical clustering; I've hit the snag too). As I understand #2 is the more mathematically-correct approach; preserving angular distance.

Evaluating vector distance measures

I am working with vectors of word frequencies and trying out some of the different distance measures available in Scikit Learns Pairwise Distances. I would like to use these distances for clustering and classification.
I usually have a feature matrix of ~ 30,000 x 100. My idea was to choose a distance metric that maximizes the pairwise distances by running pairwise differences over the same dataset with the distance metrics available in Scipy (e.g. Euclidean, Cityblock, etc.) and for each metric
convert distances computed for the dataset to zscores to normalize across metrics
get the range of these zscores, i.e. the spread of the distances
use the distance metric that gives me the widest range of distances as it apparently gives me the maximum spread over my dataset and the most variance to work with. (Cf. code below)
My questions:
Does this approach make sense?
Are there other evaluation procedures that one should try? I found these papers (Gavin, Aggarwal, but they don't apply 100 % here...)
Any help is much appreciated!
My code:
matrix=np.random.uniform(0, .1, size=(10,300)) #test data set
scipy_distances=['euclidean', 'minkowski', ...] #these are the distance metrics
for d in scipy_distances: #iterate over distances
distmatrix=sklearn.metrics.pairwise.pairwise_distances(matrix, metric=d)
distzscores = scipy.stats.mstats.zscore(distmatrix, axis=0, ddof=1)
diststats=basicstatsmaker(distzscores)
range=np.ptp(distzscores, axis=0)
print "range of metric", d, np.ptp(range)

In general - this is just a heuristic, which might, or not - work. In particular, it is easy to construct a "dummy metric" which will "win" in your approach even though it is useless. Try out
class Dummy_dist:
def __init__(self):
self.cheat = True
def __call__(self, x, y):
if self.cheat:
self.cheat = False
return 1e60
else:
return 0
dummy_dist = Dummy_dist()
This will give you huuuuge spread (even with z-score normalization). Of course this is a cheating example as this is non determinsitic, but I wanted to show the basic counterexample, and of course given your data one can construct a deterministic analogon.
So what you should do? Your metric should be treated as hyperparameter of your process. You should not divide process of generating your clustering/classification into two separate phases: choosing a distance and then learning something; but you should do this jointly, consider your clustering/classification + distance pairs as a single model, thus instead of working with k-means, you will work with k-means+euclidean, k-means+minkowsky and so on. This is the only statistically supported approach. You cannot construct a method of assessing "general goodness" of the metric, as there is no such object, metric quality can be only assessed in a particular task, which involves fixing every other element (such as a clustering/classification method, particular dataset etc.). Once you perform such wide, exhaustive evaluation, check many such pairs, on many datasets, you might claim that given metric performes best in such range of tasks.

Two Issues about mlpy.dtw package in Python?

As a newbie in Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), I find its Python implementation mlpy.dtw is not documented in a very detailed extend. I have some problems with its return value.
Regarding the returned value dist? I have two questions:
Any typo here? For standard DTW, the document says
Standard DTW as described in [Muller07], using the Euclidean distance
(absolute value of the difference) or squared Euclidean distance (as
in [Keogh01]) as local cost measure.
and for subsequence DTW, the document says
Subsequence DTW as described in [Muller07], assuming that the length
of y is much larger than the length of x and using the Manhattan
distance (absolute value of the difference) as local cost measure.
The same so-called "absolute value of the difference" corresponds two different distance metrics?
Total distance? After running the snippet
dist, cost, path = mlpy.dtw_std(x, y, dist_only=False)
dist is one value. So is it the lumped sum of all the distances between each matched pair?

Yes, the mlpy.dtw() function is not well documented.
First question: no typo here. As you can see in the documentation, euclidean, squared euclidean and manhattan distances concern the local cost measure. In this case the cost measure is defined as a distance between two real values (one dimension), see cost in the pseudocode in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_time_warping. So, in this case, Manhattan distance and Euclidean distance are the same (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_distance#One_dimension). Anyway, in the standard dtw, you can choose the euclidean distance (absolute value of the difference) or the squared euclidean distance (squared difference) by the parameter squared:
>>> import mlpy
>>> mlpy.dtw_std([1,2,3], [4,5,6], squared=False) # Euclidean distance
9.0
>>> mlpy.dtw_std([1,2,3], [4,5,6], squared=True) # Squared Euclidean distance
26.0
Second question: dist is the unnormalized minimum-distance warp path between time series x and y. It is the unnormalized DTW distance. You can normalize it dividing by len(X)+len(Y). See http://www.irit.fr/~Julien.Pinquier/Docs/TP_MABS/res/dtw-sakoe-chiba78.pdf
Cheers,
Davide

It seems to be an error in the documentation. Euclidean distance is not the "absolute value of the difference", it is the correct description of the Manhattan metric. Probably author was thinking about one dimension case, as in R both Euclidean and manhattan metrics are the same (and Euclidean metric really expresses the absolute value of the difference then). I am not familiar with the library, if it only operates on 1 dimensional objects, then there is no error and these two distance measures are equivalent
The dist value is the value of best time-warp (measured as the summarized costs of matching, see the algorithm definiton on wikipedia). So it is in fact the minimum edit distance between two sequences, where particular edits' costs are expressed in dissimilarity (distance) between "matched" objects

Wrap-around when calculating distance for k-means

I'm trying to do a K-means clustering of some dataset using sklearn. The problem is that one of the dimensions is hour-of-day: a number from 0-23 and so the distance algorithm then thinks that 0 is very far from 23, because in absolute terms it is. In reality and for my purposes, hour 0 is very close to hour 23. Is there a way to make the distance algorithm do some form of wrap-around so it computes the more 'real' time difference.
I'm doing something simple, similar to the following:
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
clusters = KMeans(n_clusters = 2)
data = vstack(data)
fit = clusters.fit(data)
classes = fit.predict(data)
data elements looks something like [22, 418, 192] where the first element is the hour.
Any ideas?

Even though #elyase answer is accepted, I think it is not the correct approach.
Yes, to use such distance you have to refine your distance measure and so - use different library. But what is more important - concept of mean used in k-means won't suit the cyclic dimension. Lets consider following example:
#current cluster X,, based on centroid position Xc=24
x1=1
x2=24
#current cluster Y, based on centroid position Yc=10
y1=12
y2=13
computing simple arithmetic mean will place the centoids in Xc=12.5,Yc=12.5, which from the point of view of cyclic meausre is incorect, it should be Xc=0.5,Yc=12.5. As you can see, asignment based on the cyclic distance measure is not "compatible" with simple mean operation, and leads to bizzare results.
Simple k-means will result in clusters {x1,y1}, {x2,y2}
Simple k--means + distance measure result in degenerated super cluster {x1,x2,y1,y2}
Correct clustering would be {x1,x2},{y1,y2}
Solving this problem requires checking one if (whether it is better to measure "simple average" or by representing one of the points as x'=x-24). Unfortunately given n points it makes 2^n possibilities.
This seems as a use case of the kernelized k-means, where you are actually clustering in the abstract feature space (in your case - a "tube" rolled around the time dimension) induced by kernel ("similarity measure", being the inner product of some vector space).
Details of the kernel k-means are given here

Why k-means doesn't work with arbitrary distances
K-means is not a distance-based algorithm.
K-means minimizes the Within-Cluster-Sum-of-Squares, which is a kind of variance (it's roughly the weighted average variance of all clusters, where each object and dimension is given the same weight).
In order for Lloyds algorithm to converge you need to have both steps optimize the same function:
the reassignment step
the centroid update step
Now the "mean" function is a least-squares estimator. I.e. choosing the mean in step 2 is optimal for the WCSS objective. Assigning objects by least-squares deviation (= squared Euclidean distance, monotone to Euclidean distance) in step 1 also yields guaranteed convergence. The mean is exactly where your wrap-around idea would fall apart.
If you plug in a random other distance function as suggested by #elyase k-means might no longer converge.
Proper solutions
There are various solutions to this:
Use K-medoids (PAM). By choosing the medoid instead of the mean you do get guaranteed convergence with arbitrary distances. However, computing the medoid is rather expensive.
Transform the data into a kernel space where you are happy with minimizing Sum-of-Squares. For example, you could transform the hour into sin(hour / 12 * pi), cos(hour / 12 * pi) which may be okay for SSQ.
Use other, distance-based clustering algorithms. K-means is old, and there has been a lot of research on clustering since. You may want to start with hierarchical clustering (which actually is just as old as k-means), and then try DBSCAN and the variants of it.

The easiest approach, to me, is to adapt the K-means algorithm wraparound dimension via computing the "circular mean" for the dimension. Of course, you will also need to change the distance-to-centroid calculation accordingly.
#compute the mean of hour 0 and 23
import numpy as np
hours = np.array(range(24))
#hours to angles
angles = hours/24 * (2*np.pi)
sin = np.sin(angles)
cos = np.cos(angles)
a = np.arctan2(sin[23]+sin[0], cos[23]+cos[0])
if a < 0: a += 2*np.pi
#angle back to hour
hour = a * 24 / (2*np.pi)
#23.5