The reliability of geographic information system (GIS) partial discharge fault diagnosis is crucial for the safe and stable operation of power grids.This study proposed a data enhancement method based on a self-attention mechanism to optimize the VAE-GAN method and solve the problem of the lack of partial discharge samples and the unbalanced distribution between different defects.First,the non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) algorithm was used to fuse the UHF and optical partial discharge signals to obtain a photoelectric fusion phase resolved partial discharge (PRPD) spectrum with richer information.Subsequently,the VAE structure was introduced into the traditional GAN,and the excellent hidden layer feature extraction ability of the VAE was used to guide the generation of the GAN.Then,the self-attention mechanism was integrated into the VAE-GAN,and the Wasserstein distance and gradient penalty mechanisms were used to optimize the network loss function and expand the sample sets to an equilibrium state.Finally,the KAZE and polar coordinate distribution entropy methods were used to extract the expanded samples.The eigenvectors of the sets were substituted into the long short-term memory (LSTM) network for partial discharge fault diagnosis.The experimental results show that the sample generation quality and fault diagnosis results of this method were significantly better than the traditional data enhancement method.The structure similarity index measure(SSIM) index is increased by 4.5% and 21.7%,respectively,and the average accuracy of fault diagnosis is increased by 22.9%,9%,5.7%,and 6.5%,respectively.The data enhancement method proposed in this study can provide a reference for GIS partial discharge fault diagnosis.