Scikit Learn GridSearchCV without cross validation (unsupervised learning)

I'm going to answer your question since it seems like it has been unanswered still. Using the parallelism method with the for loop, you can use the multiprocessing module.

from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
import functools

kmeans = KMeans()

# define your custom function for passing into each thread
def find_cluster(n_clusters, kmeans, X):
    from sklearn.metrics import silhouette_score  # you want to import in the scorer in your function

    kmeans.set_params(n_clusters=n_clusters)  # set n_cluster
    labels = kmeans.fit_predict(X)  # fit & predict
    score = silhouette_score(X, labels)  # get the score

    return score

# Now's the parallel implementation
clusters = [3, 4, 5]
pool = Pool()
results = pool.map(functools.partial(find_cluster, kmeans=kmeans, X=X), clusters)
pool.close()
pool.join()

# print the results
print(results)  # will print a list of scores that corresponds to the clusters list

After much searching, I was able to find this thread. It appears that you can get rid of cross validation in GridSearchCV if you use:

cv=[(slice(None), slice(None))]

I have tested this against my own coded version of grid search without cross validation and I get the same results from both methods. I am posting this answer to my own question in case others have the same issue.

Edit: to answer jjrr's question in the comments, here is an example use case:

from sklearn.metrics import silhouette_score as sc

def cv_silhouette_scorer(estimator, X):
    estimator.fit(X)
    cluster_labels = estimator.labels_
    num_labels = len(set(cluster_labels))
    num_samples = len(X.index)
    if num_labels == 1 or num_labels == num_samples:
        return -1
    else:
        return sc(X, cluster_labels)

cv = [(slice(None), slice(None))]
gs = GridSearchCV(estimator=sklearn.cluster.MeanShift(), param_grid=param_dict, 
                  scoring=cv_silhouette_scorer, cv=cv, n_jobs=-1)
gs.fit(df[cols_of_interest])