T-CGAN: Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Data Augmentation in Noisy Time Series with Irregular Sampling

Abstract: In this paper we propose a data augmentation method for time series with irregular sampling, Time-Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (T-CGAN). Our approach is based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN), where the generative step is implemented by a deconvolutional NN and the discriminative step by a convolutional NN. Both the generator and the discriminator are conditioned on the sampling timestamps, to learn the hidden relationship between data and timestamps, and consequently to generate new time series. We evaluate our model with synthetic and real-world datasets. For the synthetic data, we compare the performance of a classifier trained with T-CGAN-generated data, against the performance of the same classifier trained on the original data. Results show that classifiers trained on T-CGAN-generated data perform the same as classifiers trained on real data, even with very short time series and small training sets. For the real world datasets, we compare our method with other techniques of data augmentation for time series, such as time slicing and time warping, over a classification problem with unbalanced datasets. Results show that our method always outperforms the other approaches, both in case of regularly sampled and irregularly sampled time series. We achieve particularly good performance in case with a small training set and short, noisy, irregularly-sampled time series.