Custom Distance Metrics

Custom distance metrics allow you to define application-specific notions of similarity or distance between data points.

Defining Custom Metrics for sklearn

sklearn's DBSCAN accepts a callable as the metric parameter:

from sklearn.cluster import DBSCAN

def my_distance(point_a, point_b):
    """Custom distance between two points."""
    # point_a and point_b are 1D arrays
    return some_calculation(point_a, point_b)

db = DBSCAN(eps=5, min_samples=3, metric=my_distance)