Automatic sleep stage classification: A light and efficient deep neural network model based on time, frequency and fractional Fourier transform domain features

Abstract

This work proposed a novel method for automatic sleep stage classification based on the time, frequency, and fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) domain features extracted from a single-channel electroencephalogram (EEG). Bidirectional long short-term memory was applied to the proposed model to train it to learn the sleep stage transition rules according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's manual for automatic sleep stage classification. Results indicated that the features extracted from the fractional Fourier-transformed single-channel EEG may improve the performance of sleep stage classification. For the Fpz-Cz EEG of Sleep-EDF with 30 s epochs, the overall accuracy of the model increased by circa 1% with the help of the FRFT domain features and even reached 81.6%. This work thus made the application of FRFT to automatic sleep stage classification possible. The parameters of the proposed model measured 0.31 MB, which are 5% of those of DeepSleepNet, but its performance is similar to that of DeepSleepNet. Hence, the proposed model is a light and efficient model based on deep neural networks, which also has a prospect for on-device machine learning.

Keywords: Bidirectional LSTM; Fractional Fourier transform; Sleep stage classification.