# TTS-CGAN: A Transformer Time-Series Conditional GAN for Biosignal Data Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13676/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Real-valued (Medical) Time Series Generation with Recurrent Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02633/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [TransGAN: Two Pure Transformers Can Make One Strong GAN, and That Can Scale Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07074/) (2021)
- [Pretrained Transformers as Universal Computation Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05247/) (2021)
- [C-RNN-GAN: Continuous recurrent neural networks with adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09904/) (2016)
- [Beyond Face Rotation: Global and Local Perception GAN for Photorealistic and Identity Preserving Frontal View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04086/) (2017)
- [UniMiB SHAR: a new dataset for human activity recognition using acceleration data from smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07688/) (2016)
- [TTS-GAN: A Transformer-based Time-Series Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02691/) (2022)
- [Generative adversarial networks in time series: A survey and taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11098/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Vector Quantized Time Series Generation with a Bidirectional Prior Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04743/) (2023)
- [Data Augmentation for Time-Series Classification: An Extensive Empirical Study and Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10060/) (2023)
- [BioDiffusion: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Biomedical Signal Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10282/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Transformer Enabled Time Series Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02322/) (2024)
- [Controlled physics-informed data generation for deep learning-based remaining useful life prediction under unseen operation conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11702/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data Generation by Supervised Neural Gas Network for Physiological Emotion Recognition Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16353/) (2025)
- [Masked Generative Modeling with Enhanced Sampling Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07945/) (2023)
- [ECG-WM: A Physiology-Informed ECG World Model for Clinical Intervention Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17580/) (2026)
- [Accurate Detection of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation with Certified-GAN and Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10173/) (2023)
- [Synthetic ECG Generation for Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning in Arrhythmia Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18456/) (2024)
- [STEB: In Search of the Best Evaluation Approach for Synthetic Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21160/) (2025)
- [Constraint Latent Space Matters: An Anti-anomalous Waveform Transformation Solution from Photoplethysmography to Arterial Blood Pressure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17780/) (2024)
- [Generating Synthetic Time Series Data for Cyber-Physical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08601/) (2024)
- [Simulating realistic short tandem repeat capillary electrophoretic signal using a generative adversarial network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16169/) (2024)
- [Blending Low and High-Level Semantics of Time Series for Better Masked Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16613/) (2024)
- [MM-DADM: Multimodal Drug-Aware Diffusion Model for Virtual Clinical Trials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07297/) (2025)
- [Challenges and Limitations of Generative AI in Synthesizing Wearable Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14206/) (2025)
- [Financial time series augmentation using transformer based GAN architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17865/) (2026)
- [Exploring the Potential of Probabilistic Transformer for Time Series Modeling: A Report on the ST-PT Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26762/) (2026)
- [Represent, Then Generate: Multimodal-Conditioned Time-Series Generation under Irregular Missingness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12592/) (2026)
- [GALA: Generation-Aware Cross-Modal Alignment for Text-to-Time-Series Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13741/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Signal measurement appearing in the form of time series is one of the most common types of data used in medical machine learning applications. Such datasets are often small in size, expensive to collect and annotate, and might involve privacy issues, which hinders our ability to train large, state-of-the-art deep learning models for biomedical applications. For time-series data, the suite of data augmentation strategies we can use to expand the size of the dataset is limited by the need to maintain the basic properties of the signal. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be utilized as another data augmentation tool. In this paper, we present TTS-CGAN, a transformer-based conditional GAN model that can be trained on existing multi-class datasets and generate class-specific synthetic time-series sequences of arbitrary length. We elaborate on the model architecture and design strategies. Synthetic sequences generated by our model are indistinguishable from real ones, and can be used to complement or replace real signals of the same type, thus achieving the goal of data augmentation. To evaluate the quality of the generated data, we modify the wavelet coherence metric to be able to compare the similarity between two sets of signals, and also conduct a case study where a mix of synthetic and real data are used to train a deep learning model for sequence classification. Together with other visualization techniques and qualitative evaluation approaches, we demonstrate that TTS-CGAN generated synthetic data are similar to real data, and that our model performs better than the other state-of-the-art GAN models built for time-series data generation.