WN-Sleep: Modeling Whole-Night Data for Improved Sleep Staging Classification

Sleep staging, crucial for diagnosing sleep disorders, requires precise recognition of physiological signals within 30-second epochs, a task fundamentally different from managing long-term semantic dependencies in natural language processing (NLP). Our model aims to refine the integration of local and global features for more accurate sleep stage classification. Following the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) guidelines, it focuses on rigorous intra-epoch feature extraction to ensure reliable identification of sleep stages. Moreover, our approach incorporates a global perspective by analyzing whole-night data, which is essential for handling transitional periods and ambiguities. Existing sequential modeling techniques often overlook the unique requirements of sleep staging, leading to performance declines when epochs extend beyond approximately 200. Our model addresses this by structurally processing local and global information and carefully balancing detailed intra-epoch analysis with an overarching view of sleep cycles through a gating mechanism. This gate mechanism selectively integrates long-term dependencies, optimizing the balance between local accuracy and global context. This approach represents a significant advancement over existing models, offering more accurate, reliable, and clinically relevant sleep staging. Extensive experiments on the SHHS, SleepEDF-20, and SleepEDF-78 datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.