Diff-MN: Diffusion Parameterized MoE-NCDE for Continuous Time Series Generation with Irregular Observations

  • Xu Zhang ,
  • Junwei Deng ,
  • ,
  • Hao Li ,
  • Jiang Bian

arXiv

Publication | Publication

Time series generation (TSG) is widely used across domains, yet most existing methods assume regular sampling and fixed output resolutions. These assumptions are often violated in practice, where observations are irregular and sparse, while downstream applications require continuous and high-resolution TS. Although Neural Controlled Differential Equation (NCDE) is promising for modeling irregular TS, it is constrained by a single dynamics function, tightly coupled optimization, and limited ability to adapt learned dynamics to newly generated samples from the generative model. We propose Diff-MN, a continuous TSG framework that enhances NCDE with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) dynamics function and a decoupled architectural design for dynamics-focused training. To further enable NCDE to generalize to newly generated samples, Diff-MN employs a diffusion model to parameterize the NCDE temporal dynamics parameters (MoE weights), i.e., jointly learn the distribution of TS data and MoE weights. This design allows sample-specific NCDE parameters to be generated for continuous TS generation. Experiments on ten public and synthetic datasets demonstrate that Diff-MN consistently outperforms strong baselines on both irregular-to-regular and irregular-to-continuous TSG tasks. The code is available at the link https://github.com/microsoft/TimeCraft/tree/main/Diff-MN.

Outils connexes

TimeCraft: A Time Series Generation Framework for Real-World Applications

TimeCraft offers a unified, practical solution for real-world time series generation—combining cross-domain generalization, text-based control, and task-aware adaptation. It’s designed to produce high-quality, controllable synthetic data that’s both realistic and useful for downstream applications.