Is there a way to assign a maximum number of clusters using DBSCAN?
Not with DBSCAN itself. Connected components are connected components, there is no ambiguity at this point.
You could write your own rules to extract the X most significant costs from an OPTICS plot though. OPTICS is the more variable formulation of DBSCAN.
If I am trying to cluster my data using DBSCAN, is there a way to assign a maximum number of clusters? I know I can set the minimum distance between points to be considered a cluster, but my data changes case by case and I would prefer to not allow more than 4 clusters. Any suggestions?