diffusion-ts
TSGDiff: Rethinking Synthetic Time Series Generation from a Pure Graph Perspective
Shen, Lifeng, Li, Xuyang, Long, Lele
Diffusion models have shown great promise in data generation, yet generating time series data remains challenging due to the need to capture complex temporal dependencies and structural patterns. In this paper, we present \textit{TSGDiff}, a novel framework that rethinks time series generation from a graph-based perspective. Specifically, we represent time series as dynamic graphs, where edges are constructed based on Fourier spectrum characteristics and temporal dependencies. A graph neural network-based encoder-decoder architecture is employed to construct a latent space, enabling the diffusion process to model the structural representation distribution of time series effectively. Furthermore, we propose the Topological Structure Fidelity (Topo-FID) score, a graph-aware metric for assessing the structural similarity of time series graph representations. Topo-FID integrates two sub-metrics: Graph Edit Similarity, which quantifies differences in adjacency matrices, and Structural Entropy Similarity, which evaluates the entropy of node degree distributions. This comprehensive metric provides a more accurate assessment of structural fidelity in generated time series. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that \textit{TSGDiff} generates high-quality synthetic time series data generation, faithfully preserving temporal dependencies and structural integrity, thereby advancing the field of synthetic time series generation.
Diffolio: A Diffusion Model for Multivariate Probabilistic Financial Time-Series Forecasting and Portfolio Construction
Cho, So-Yoon, Kim, Jin-Young, Ban, Kayoung, Koo, Hyeng Keun, Kim, Hyun-Gyoon
Probabilistic forecasting is crucial in multivariate financial time-series for constructing efficient portfolios that account for complex cross-sectional dependencies. In this paper, we propose Diffolio, a diffusion model designed for multivariate financial time-series forecasting and portfolio construction. Diffolio employs a denoising network with a hierarchical attention architecture, comprising both asset-level and market-level layers. Furthermore, to better reflect cross-sectional correlations, we introduce a correlation-guided regularizer informed by a stable estimate of the target correlation matrix. This structure effectively extracts salient features not only from historical returns but also from asset-specific and systematic covariates, significantly enhancing the performance of forecasts and portfolios. Experimental results on the daily excess returns of 12 industry portfolios show that Diffolio outperforms various probabilistic forecasting baselines in multivariate forecasting accuracy and portfolio performance. Moreover, in portfolio experiments, portfolios constructed from Diffolio's forecasts show consistently robust performance, thereby outperforming those from benchmarks by achieving higher Sharpe ratios for the mean-variance tangency portfolio and higher certainty equivalents for the growth-optimal portfolio. These results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed Diffolio in terms of not only statistical accuracy but also economic significance.
Less Is More: Generating Time Series with LLaMA-Style Autoregression in Simple Factorized Latent Spaces
Li, Siyuan, Sun, Yifan, Cheng, Lei, Wang, Lewen, Liu, Yang, Liu, Weiqing, Li, Jianlong, Bian, Jiang, Fang, Shikai
Generative models for multivariate time series are essential for data augmentation, simulation, and privacy preservation, yet current state-of-the-art diffusion-based approaches are slow and limited to fixed-length windows. We propose FAR-TS, a simple yet effective framework that combines disentangled factorization with an autoregressive Transformer over a discrete, quantized latent space to generate time series. Each time series is decomposed into a data-adaptive basis that captures static cross-channel correlations and temporal coefficients that are vector-quantized into discrete tokens. A LLaMA-style autoregressive Transformer then models these token sequences, enabling fast and controllable generation of sequences with arbitrary length. Owing to its streamlined design, FAR-TS achieves orders-of-magnitude faster generation than Diffusion-TS while preserving cross-channel correlations and an interpretable latent space, enabling high-quality and flexible time series synthesis.
How to Unlock Time Series Editing? Diffusion-Driven Approach with Multi-Grained Control
Yu, Hao, Cheng, Chu Xin, Yu, Runlong, Ye, Yuyang, Tong, Shiwei, Liu, Zhaofeng, Lian, Defu
Recent advances in time series generation have shown promise, yet controlling properties in generated sequences remains challenging. Time Series Editing (TSE) - making precise modifications while preserving temporal coherence - consider both point-level constraints and segment-level controls that current methods struggle to provide. We introduce the CocktailEdit framework to enable simultaneous, flexible control across different types of constraints. This framework combines two key mechanisms: a confidence-weighted anchor control for point-wise constraints and a classifier-based control for managing statistical properties such as sums and averages over segments. Our methods achieve precise local control during the denoising inference stage while maintaining temporal coherence and integrating seamlessly, with any conditionally trained diffusion-based time series models. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and models demonstrate its effectiveness. Our work bridges the gap between pure generative modeling and real-world time series editing needs, offering a flexible solution for human-in-the-loop time series generation and editing. The code and demo are provided for validation.
Generative Models for Long Time Series: Approximately Equivariant Recurrent Network Structures for an Adjusted Training Scheme
Fulek, Ruwen, Lange-Hegermann, Markus
We present a simple yet effective generative model for time series data based on a Varia-tional Autoencoder (V AE) with recurrent layers, referred to as the Recurrent Variational Autoencoder with Subsequent Training (R V AE-ST). Our method introduces an adapted training scheme that progressively increases the sequence length, addressing the challenge recurrent layers typically face when modeling long sequences. By leveraging the recurrent architecture, the model maintains a constant number of parameters regardless of sequence length. This design encourages approximate time-shift equivariance and enables efficient modeling of long-range temporal dependencies. Rather than introducing a fundamentally new architecture, we show that a carefully composed combination of known components can match or outperform state-of-the-art generative models on several benchmark datasets. Our model performs particularly well on time series that exhibit quasi-periodic structure, while remaining competitive on datasets with more irregular or partially non-stationary behavior. We evaluate its performance using ELBO, Frรฉchet Distance, discriminative scores, and visualizations of the learned embeddings.
AI-Generated Fall Data: Assessing LLMs and Diffusion Model for Wearable Fall Detection
Alamgeer, Sana, Souissi, Yasine, Ngu, Anne H. H.
Training fall detection systems is challenging due to the scarcity of real-world fall data, particularly from elderly individuals. To address this, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic fall data. This study evaluates text-to-motion (T2M, SATO, ParCo) and text-to-text models (GPT4o, GPT4, Gemini) in simulating realistic fall scenarios. We generate synthetic datasets and integrate them with four real-world baseline datasets to assess their impact on fall detection performance using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. Additionally, we compare LLM-generated synthetic data with a diffusion-based method to evaluate their alignment with real accelerometer distributions. Results indicate that dataset characteristics significantly influence the effectiveness of synthetic data, with LLM-generated data performing best in low-frequency settings (e.g., 20Hz) while showing instability in high-frequency datasets (e.g., 200Hz). While text-to-motion models produce more realistic biomechanical data than text-to-text models, their impact on fall detection varies. Diffusion-based synthetic data demonstrates the closest alignment to real data but does not consistently enhance model performance. An ablation study further confirms that the effectiveness of synthetic data depends on sensor placement and fall representation. These findings provide insights into optimizing synthetic data generation for fall detection models.
CENTS: Generating synthetic electricity consumption time series for rare and unseen scenarios
Fuest, Michael, Cuesta, Alfredo, Veeramachaneni, Kalyan
Recent breakthroughs in large-scale generative modeling have demonstrated the potential of foundation models in domains such as natural language, computer vision, and protein structure prediction. However, their application in the energy and smart grid sector remains limited due to the scarcity and heterogeneity of high-quality data. In this work, we propose a method for creating high-fidelity electricity consumption time series data for rare and unseen context variables (e.g. location, building type, photovoltaics). Our approach, Context Encoding and Normalizing Time Series Generation, or CENTS, includes three key innovations: (i) A context normalization approach that enables inverse transformation for time series context variables unseen during training, (ii) a novel context encoder to condition any state-of-the-art time-series generator on arbitrary numbers and combinations of context variables, (iii) a framework for training this context encoder jointly with a time-series generator using an auxiliary context classification loss designed to increase expressivity of context embeddings and improve model performance. We further provide a comprehensive overview of different evaluation metrics for generative time series models. Our results highlight the efficacy of the proposed method in generating realistic household-level electricity consumption data, paving the way for training larger foundation models in the energy domain on synthetic as well as real-world data.
FM-TS: Flow Matching for Time Series Generation
Hu, Yang, Wang, Xiao, Wu, Lirong, Zhang, Huatian, Li, Stan Z., Wang, Sheng, Chen, Tianlong
Time series generation has emerged as an essential tool for analyzing temporal data across numerous fields. While diffusion models have recently gained significant attention in generating high-quality time series, they tend to be computationally demanding and reliant on complex stochastic processes. To address these limitations, we introduce FM-TS, a rectified Flow Matching-based framework for Time Series generation, which simplifies the time series generation process by directly optimizing continuous trajectories. This approach avoids the need for iterative sampling or complex noise schedules typically required in diffusion-based models. FM-TS is more efficient in terms of training and inference. Moreover, FM-TS is highly adaptive, supporting both conditional and unconditional time series generation. Notably, through our novel inference design, the model trained in an unconditional setting can seamlessly generalize to conditional tasks without the need for retraining. Extensive benchmarking across both settings demonstrates that FM-TS consistently delivers superior performance compared to existing approaches while being more efficient in terms of training and inference. For instance, in terms of discriminative score, FM-TS achieves 0.005, 0.019, 0.011, 0.005, 0.053, and 0.106 on the Sines, Stocks, ETTh, MuJoCo, Energy, and fMRI unconditional time series datasets, respectively, significantly outperforming the second-best method which achieves 0.006, 0.067, 0.061, 0.008, 0.122, and 0.167 on the same datasets. We have achieved superior performance in solar forecasting and MuJoCo imputation tasks, significantly enhanced by our innovative $t$ power sampling method. The code is available at https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/FMTS.