A Two-Stage Neural Network for Sleep Stage Classification Based on Feature Learning, Sequence Learning, and Data Augmentation

Sleep stage classification is a fundamental but cumbersome task in sleep analysis. To score the sleep stage automatically, this study presents a stage classification method based on a two-stage neural network. The feature learning stage as the first stage can fuse network trained features with traditional hand-crafted features. A recurrent neural network (RNN) in the second stage is fully utilized for learning temporal information between sleep epochs and obtaining classification results. To solve serious sample imbalance problem, a novel pre-training process combined with data augmentation was introduced. The proposed method was evaluated by two public databases, the Sleep-EDF and Sleep Apnea (SA). The proposed method can achieve the F1-score and Kappa coefficient of 0.806 and 0.80 for healthy subjects, respectively, and achieve 0.790 and 0.74 for the subjects with suspect sleep disorders, respectively. The results show that the method can achieve better performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods for the same databases. Model analysis displayed that the combination of the hand-crafted features and network trained features can improve the classification performance via the comparison experiments. In addition, the RNN is a good choice for learning temporal information in sleep epochs. Besides, the pre-training process with data augmentation is verified that can reduce the impact of sample imbalance. The proposed model has potential to exploit sleep information comprehensively.