HyperTime: Implicit Neural Representations for Time Series Generation

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool that provides an accurate and resolution-independent encoding of data. Their robustness as general approximators has been shown in a wide variety of data sources, with applications on image, sound, and 3D scene representation. However, little attention has been given to leveraging these architectures for the representation and analysis of time series data. In this paper, we propose a new INR architecture for time series (iSIREN) designed to perform an accurate reconstruction of univariate and multivariate data, while also providing an interpretable encoding of the signal. We compare our architecture against SIREN and INRs with different activations, in terms of training convergence, and the reconstruction accuracy of both the signal and its spectral distribution. To achieve generalization, we propose a hypernetwork architecture (HyperTime) that leverages iSIRENs to learn a latent representation of an entire time series dataset. In addition to the traditional reconstruction loss, we introduce an FFT-based loss that guides the training by enforcing a good match of the ground truth spectral distribution. We show how these architectures can be used for time series generation, and evaluate our method through fidelity metrics, presenting results that exceed the performance of state-of-the-art techniques. Finally, we propose an alternative hypernetwork architecture (iHyperTime) that incorporates interpretability into the latent representation, enabling the introduction of prior knowledge by imposing constraints into the generation process.