torch-dcr: efficient DCR (Distance to Closest Record) for tabular data.

A library for efficient, GPU-accelerated computation of DCR (Distance to Closest Record) for heterogeneous tabular data.

DCR measures, for each record in a source dataset, how close the nearest record in a target dataset is. It is commonly used to evaluate privacy risk in synthetic data: if synthetic records are too close to the training records, synthetic data probably leaks information about individuals in the training set. torch-dcr computes this efficiently on CPU or GPU using PyTorch, and handles datasets with a mix of continuous and categorical columns out of the box.

Basic usage

import pandas as pd
from torch_dcr import dcr

source_df = pd.DataFrame(
    {
        "A": [4, 0, 3],
        "B": ["a", "b", "d"],
        "C": [1.12, -1.6, 6],
    }
)
target_df = pd.DataFrame(
    {
        "A": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
        "B": ["f", "b", "g", "d", "d"],
        "C": [0.0, 0.0, 2.0, -12.0, -4.0],
    }
)

dcr(source_df, target_df, metric="cosine")

Output:

      dcr_1
0  0.667516
1  0.166855
2  0.449738

Each row corresponds to a record in source_df, and dcr_1 is the distance to the closest record found in target_df.

Installation

To install the library run:

pip install torch-dcr

How mixed-type data is handled

Real-world tabular data usually mixes continuous columns (e.g. floats, ints) with categorical columns (e.g. strings). torch-dcr handles this automatically. The standard approach consists in converting categorical columns to one-hot encoded vectors, and then computing distances in the resulting high-dimensional space. torch-dcr performs this computation without instantiating the full one-hot encodings, saving a considerable amount of memory and computation time. Categorical columns are automatically detected based on the DataFrame's dtypes.

Advanced usage

dcr_df, indexes_df = dcr(
    source_df=source_df,   # Source DataFrame; DCR is computed for each record in this DataFrame
    target_df=target_df,   # Target DataFrame where the closest records are searched
    output_indexes=True,   # If True, also return the indexes of the closest records
    k=2,                   # Number of closest records to consider for each record in source_df
    metric="l1",           # Distance metric for continuous columns: "cosine", "euclidean", or "l1"
    device="cuda",         # "cpu" or "cuda" for GPU acceleration
    standardize=True,      # Whether to standardize continuous features before computing distances
    batch_size=1000,       # Batch size for processing, useful for large DataFrames
)

Output:

DCR:
       dcr_1     dcr_2
0  2.790001  3.465423
1  1.551357  2.918901
2  2.716115  3.055198

Indexes:
   index_1  index_2
0        2        1
1        1        0
2        2        4

With k=2, dcr_1/dcr_2 are the distances to the 1st and 2nd closest records in target_df, and index_1/index_2 (from indexes_df) are the corresponding row indexes in target_df.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
source_df	pd.DataFrame	required	Records for which DCR is computed
target_df	pd.DataFrame	required	Records searched for nearest neighbors
metric	str	"cosine"	Distance metric for continuous columns: "cosine", "euclidean", or "l1"
k	int	1	Number of nearest neighbors to return per record
output_indexes	bool	False	If True, also return a DataFrame of nearest-neighbor indexes
standardize	bool	True	Standardize continuous columns before computing distances
device	str	"cpu"	"cpu" or "cuda"
batch_size	int	1000	Batch size to limit memory usage on large datasets
progress_bar	bool	True	If True, show a progress bar during computation

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.

Citation

If you use torch-dcr in your research or project, please cite it using the following bibtex entry:

@misc{torch_dcr_2026,
  author       = {Davide Scassola},
  title        = {torch-dcr: A fast implementation of the DCR (Distance to Closest Record) for tabular data},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {GitHub},
  journal      = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{[https://github.com/DavideScassola/torch-dcr](https://github.com/DavideScassola/torch-dcr)}}
}