# TSGDiff: Rethinking Synthetic Time Series Generation from a Pure Graph Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12174/

## 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 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [Real-valued (Medical) Time Series Generation with Recurrent Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02633/) (2017)
- [Diffusion-TS: Interpretable Diffusion for General Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01742/) (2024)
- [GP-VAE: Deep Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04155/) (2019)
- [TimeVAE: A Variational Auto-Encoder for Multivariate Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08095/) (2021)
- [FourierGNN: Rethinking Multivariate Time Series Forecasting from a Pure Graph Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06190/) (2023)
- [PSA-GAN: Progressive Self Attention GANs for Synthetic Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00981/) (2021)
- [Deep Latent State Space Models for Time-Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12749/) (2022)
- [Time Series Diffusion in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05933/) (2024)
- [EdgeNets:Edge Varying Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07620/) (2020)
- [Time2Graph: Revisiting Time Series Modeling with Dynamic Shapelets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04143/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TimeTok: Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation via Hierarchical Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01418/) (2026)
- [TriHead-GAN: A Generative Adversarial Network with Triple-Head Discriminator for Carbon Emission Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07569/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 textitTSGDiff, 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 textitTSGDiff generates high-quality synthetic time series data generation, faithfully preserving temporal dependencies and structural integrity, thereby advancing the field of synthetic time series generation.