Four State Sleep Staging From a Multilayered Algorithm Using Electrocardiographic and Actigraphic Data

Sleep studies are important to evaluate sleep and sleep-related disorders. The standard test for evaluating sleep is polysomnography, during which several physiological signals are recorded separately and simultaneously with specialized equipment that requires a technologist. Simpler recordings that can model the results of a polysomnography would provide the benefit of expanding the possibilities of sleep recordings.

Using the publicly available sleep data set from the multiethnic study of atherosclerosis and 1769 nights of sleep, we extracted a distinct data subset with engineered features of the biomarkers collected by actigraphic, oxygenation, and electrocardiographic sensors. We then applied scalable models with recurrent neural network and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) with a layered approach to produce an algorithm that we then validated with a separate data set of 177 nights.

The algorithm achieved an overall performance of 0.833 accuracy and 0.736 kappa in classifying into four states: wake, light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM). Using feature analysis, we demonstrated that heart rate variability is the most salient feature, which is similar to prior reports.

Our results demonstrate the potential benefit of a multilayered algorithm and achieved higher accuracy and kappa than previously described approaches for staging sleep. The results further the possibility of simple, wearable devices for sleep staging. Code is available at https://github.com/NovelaNeuro/nEureka-SleepStaging .