UC Santa Barbara

Real-world data can be multimodal distributed, e.g., data describing the opinion divergence in a community, the interspike interval distribution of neurons, and the oscillators' natural frequencies. Generating multimodal distributed real-world data has become a challenge to existing generative adversarial networks (GANs). For example, it is often observed that Neural SDEs have only demonstrated successful performance mainly in generating unimodal time series datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel time series generator, named directed chain GANs (DC-GANs), which inserts a time series dataset (called a neighborhood process of the directed chain or input) into the drift and diffusion coefficients of the directed chain SDEs with distributional constraints. DC-GANs can generate new time series of the same distribution as the neighborhood process, and the neighborhood process will provide the key step in learning and generating multimodal distributed time series. The proposed DC-GANs are examined on four datasets, including two stochastic models from social sciences and computational neuroscience, and two real-world datasets on stock prices and energy consumption. To our best knowledge, DC-GANs are the first work that can generate multimodal time series data and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks with respect to measures of distribution, data similarity, and predictive ability.