Inpainting-Style Conditional Diffusion for Multivariable Time Series Forecasting

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel conditional diffusion-based framework for multivariable time-series solar power forecasting. The proposed method reformulates temporal PV data as structured two-dimensional representations (images) using a sliding-window patch construction, enabling the application of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) within a unified spatiotemporal learning paradigm. A key contribution of this work is the formulation of solar forecasting as an inpainting problem, where future time steps are treated as missing regions to be reconstructed. This is achieved through a mask-based conditional diffusion mechanism, in which historical observations are preserved as conditioning context while the target (future) region is progressively corrupted and subsequently recovered via reverse diffusion. The model learns to generate coherent future sequences conditioned on observed data, effectively performing time-series inpainting. To fully utilize all available features and ensure compatibility with U-Net architectural constraints, a zero-padding strategy is introduced to construct fixed-size inputs. The model is trained using a supervised denoising objective to predict injected noise, enabling accurate iterative reconstruction during the reverse process. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark PV dataset, including GEFCom2014, demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high forecasting accuracy, particularly for short-term horizons. The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating diffusion-based generative modeling with an inpainting formulation for robust, flexible, and high-fidelity solar power forecasting.