If you negate an array, the lowest elements become the highest elements and vice-versa. Therefore, the indices of the n highest elements are:
(-avgDists).argsort()[:n]
Another way to reason about this, as mentioned in the comments, is to observe that the big elements are coming last in the argsort. So, you can read from the tail of the argsort to find the n highest elements:
avgDists.argsort()[::-1][:n]
Both methods are O(n log n) in time complexity, because the argsort call is the dominant term here. But the second approach has a nice advantage: it replaces an O(n) negation of the array with an O(1) slice. If you’re working with small arrays inside loops then you may get some performance gains from avoiding that negation, and if you’re working with huge arrays then you can save on memory usage because the negation creates a copy of the entire array.
Note that these methods do not always give equivalent results: if a stable sort implementation is requested to argsort, e.g. by passing the keyword argument kind='mergesort', then the first strategy will preserve the sorting stability, but the second strategy will break stability (i.e. the positions of equal items will get reversed).
Example timings:
Using a small array of 100 floats and a length 30 tail, the view method was about 15% faster
>>> avgDists = np.random.rand(100)
>>> n = 30
>>> timeit (-avgDists).argsort()[:n]
1.93 µs ± 6.68 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
>>> timeit avgDists.argsort()[::-1][:n]
1.64 µs ± 3.39 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
>>> timeit avgDists.argsort()[-n:][::-1]
1.64 µs ± 3.66 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
For larger arrays, the argsort is dominant and there is no significant timing difference
>>> avgDists = np.random.rand(1000)
>>> n = 300
>>> timeit (-avgDists).argsort()[:n]
21.9 µs ± 51.2 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
>>> timeit avgDists.argsort()[::-1][:n]
21.7 µs ± 33.3 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
>>> timeit avgDists.argsort()[-n:][::-1]
21.9 µs ± 37.1 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
Please note that the comment from nedim below is incorrect. Whether to truncate before or after reversing makes no difference in efficiency, since both of these operations are only striding a view of the array differently and not actually copying data.