An ensemble system for automatic sleep stage classification using single channel EEG signal

The present work aims at automatic identification of various sleep stages like, sleep stages 1, 2, slow wave sleep (sleep stages 3 and 4), REM sleep and wakefulness from single channel EEG signal. Automatic scoring of sleep stages was performed with the help of pattern recognition technique which involves feature extraction, selection and finally classification. Total 39 numbers of features from time domain, frequency domain and from non-linear analysis were extracted. After extraction of features, SVM based recursive feature elimination (RFE) technique was used to find the optimum number of feature subset which can provide significant classification performance with reduced number of features for the five different sleep stages. Finally for classification, binary SVMs were combined with one-against-all (OAA) strategy. Careful extraction and selection of optimum feature subset helped to reduce the classification error to 8.9% for training dataset, validated by k-fold cross-validation (CV) technique and 10.61% in the case of independent testing dataset. Agreement of the estimated sleep stages with those obtained by expert scoring for all sleep stages of training dataset was 0.877 and for independent testing dataset it was 0.8572. The proposed ensemble SVM-based method could be used as an efficient and cost-effective method for sleep staging with the advantage of reducing stress and burden imposed on subjects.