TimeAutoDiff: A Unified Framework for Generation, Imputation, Forecasting, and Time-Varying Metadata Conditioning of Heterogeneous Time Series Tabular Data

TL;DR

TimeAutoDiff is a versatile diffusion-based framework that handles generation, imputation, forecasting, and conditional generation of heterogeneous time series data efficiently, supporting complex feature types and enabling scenario exploration.

Contribution

It introduces a unified latent-diffusion model combining a VAE and a diffusion process for multiple time-series tasks with heterogeneous features, improving speed and scalability.

Findings

Matches or surpasses baseline performance in sequence fidelity.

Improves imputation and forecasting accuracy.

Enables realistic scenario editing through metadata conditioning.

Abstract

We present TimeAutoDiff, a unified latent-diffusion framework for four fundamental time-series tasks: unconditional generation, missing-data imputation, forecasting, and time-varying-metadata conditional generation. The model natively supports heterogeneous features including continuous, binary, and categorical variables. We unify all tasks using a masked-modeling strategy in which a binary mask specifies which time-series cells are observed and which must be generated. TimeAutoDiff combines a lightweight variational autoencoder, which maps mixed-type features into a continuous latent sequence, with a diffusion model that learns temporal dynamics in this latent space. Two architectural choices provide strong speed and scalability benefits. The diffusion model samples an entire latent trajectory at once rather than denoising one timestep at a time, greatly reducing reverse-diffusion calls. In addition, the VAE compresses along the feature axis, enabling efficient modeling of wide tables in a low-dimensional latent space. Empirical evaluation shows that TimeAutoDiff matches or surpasses strong baselines in synthetic sequence fidelity and consistently improves imputation and forecasting performance. Metadata conditioning enables realistic scenario exploration, allowing users to edit metadata sequences and produce coherent counterfactual trajectories that preserve cross-feature dependencies. Ablation studies highlight the importance of the VAE's feature encoding and key components of the denoiser. A distance-to-closest-record audit further indicates that the model generalizes without excessive memorization. Code is available at https://github.com/namjoonsuh/TimeAutoDiff