A diffusion-based generative model for financial time series via geometric Brownian motion
On the map: Diffusion models → Flow matching, time series and science
Abstract (arXiv)
We propose a novel diffusion-based generative framework for financial time series that incorporates geometric Brownian motion (GBM), the foundation of the Black--Scholes theory, into the forward noising process. Unlike standard score-based models that treat price trajectories as generic numerical sequences, our method injects noise proportionally to asset prices at each time step, reflecting the heteroskedasticity observed in financial time series. By accurately balancing the drift and diffusion terms, we show that the resulting log-price process reduces to a variance-exploding stochastic differential equation, aligning with the formulation in score-based generative models. The reverse-time generative process is trained via denoising score matching using a Transformer-based architecture adapted from the Conditional Score-based Diffusion Imputation (CSDI) framework. Empirical evaluations on historical stock data demonstrate that our model reproduces key stylized facts heavy-tailed return distributions, volatility clustering, and the leverage effect more realistically than conventional diffusion models.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 7 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.
Builds on
7 of 23 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023MissDiff: Training Diffusion Models on Tabular Data with Missing Values2 Jul
- 2021CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation7 Jul
Other references · 5
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
- 2020DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesiscited by 1,354
- 2022Categorical SDEs with Simplex Diffusioncited by 42
- 2020Deep Learning Based on Generative Adversarial and Convolutional Neural Networks for Financial Time Series Predictionscited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
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Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2026High-Quality Synthetic Financial Time-Series using a GAN-Diffusion Framework
- 2025Factor-Based Conditional Diffusion Model for Contextual Portfolio Optimization