Feature extraction for snore sound via neural network processing

Snore sound (SS) is the earliest and the most common symptom of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) which is a serious disease caused by the collapse of upper airways during sleep. SS should carry vital information on the state of the upper airways and is simple to acquire and rich in features but their analysis is complicated. In this study we use neural network (NN) based method to model SS via a simple second order one-step predictor. We show that the some hidden information/feature of a SS can be conveniently captured in the connection-weight-space (CWS) of the NN, after a process of supervised training. The availability of the proposed method is investigated by performing independent component analysis (ICA) on CWS.