Sleep Stage Classification Using Time-Frequency Spectra From Consecutive Multi-Time Points

Sleep stage classification is an open challenge in the field of sleep research. Considering the relatively small size of datasets used by previous studies, in this paper we used the Sleep Heart Health Study dataset from the National Sleep Research Resource database. A long short-term memory (LSTM) network using a time-frequency spectra of several consecutive 30 s time points as an input was used to perform the sleep stage classification. Four classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using a time-frequency spectra of a single 30 s time point as an input were used for comparison. Results showed that, when considering the temporal information within the time-frequency spectrum of a single 30 s time point, the LSTM network had a better classification performance than the CNNs. Moreover, when additional temporal information was taken into consideration, the classification performance of the LSTM network gradually increased. It reached its peak when temporal information from three consecutive 30 s time points was considered, with a classification accuracy of 87.4% and a Cohen’s Kappa coefficient of 0.8216. Compared with CNNs, our results indicate that for sleep stage classification, the temporal information within the data or the features extracted from the data should be considered. LSTM networks take this temporal information into account, and thus, may be more suitable for sleep stage classification.