EEG-Based Automatic Sleep Staging Using Ontology and Weighting Feature Analysis.

Journal: Computational and mathematical methods in medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

Sleep staging is considered as an effective indicator for auxiliary diagnosis of sleep diseases and related psychiatric diseases, so it attracts a lot of attention from sleep researchers. Nevertheless, sleep staging based on visual inspection of tradition is subjective, time-consuming, and error-prone due to the large bulk of data which have to be processed. Therefore, automatic sleep staging is essential in order to solve these problems. In this article, an electroencephalogram- (EEG-) based scheme that is able to automatically classify sleep stages is proposed. Firstly, EEG data are preprocessed to remove artifacts, extract features, and normalization. Secondly, the normalized features and other context information are stored using an ontology-based model (OBM). Thirdly, an improved method of self-adaptive correlation analysis is designed to select the most effective EEG features. Based on these EEG features and weighting features analysis, the improved random forest (RF) is considered as the classifier to achieve the classification of sleep stages. To investigate the classification ability of the proposed method, several sets of experiments are designed and conducted to classify the sleep stages into two, three, four, and five states. The accuracy of five-state classification is 89.37%, which is improved compared to the accuracy using unimproved RF (84.37%) or previously reported classifiers. In addition, a set of controlled experiments is executed to verify the effect of the number of sleep segments (epochs) on the classification, and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is less affected by the sleep segments.

Authors

  • Bingtao Zhang
    School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.
  • Tao Lei
    College of Electronical and Information Engineering, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, Xi'an, China.
  • Hong Liu
    Key Laboratory of Grain and Oil Processing and Food Safety of Sichuan Province, College of Food and Bioengineering, Xihua University Chengdu 610039 China xingyage1@163.com.
  • Hanshu Cai
    School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.