Efficient system for classifying cyclic alternating pattern phases in sleep

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are a popular tool to analyze sleep patterns. Cyclic alternating patterns (CAP) can be observed in EEG signals during unconscious periods of sleep. Detailed study of CAP can help in early diagnosis of many sleep disorders. Firstly, the CAP cycles need to be segregated into their constituents, phase A and phase B periods. In this work, we develop an accurate and easy-to-implement system to distinguish between the two CAP phases. The EEG signals are denoised and divided into smaller segments for an easier processing. These segments are decomposed into different frequency sub-bands using zero-phase filtering. Thereafter, statistical features are extracted from the sub-band components, and significant features are selected using the Kruskal-Wallis test. We consider four different algorithms for classification, namely, k-nearest neighbour (kNN), support vector machine (SVM), bagged tree (BT) and neural network (NN). The classification results are compiled for the datasets that include healthy subjects and those suffering from insomnia. The BT classifier produces the best results for the combined balanced dataset, with 83.29% accuracy and 83.58% F-1 score. The proposed method is more accurate and efficient than the existing schemes and can be considered for widespread deployments in real-world scenarios.