MultiScaleSleepNet: A Hybrid CNN–BiLSTM–Transformer Architecture with Multi-Scale Feature Representation for Single-Channel EEG Sleep Stage Classification

Accurate automatic sleep stage classification from single-channel EEG remains challenging due to the need for effective extraction of multiscale neurophysiological features and modeling of long-range temporal dependencies. This study aims to address these limitations by developing an efficient and compact deep learning architecture tailored for wearable and edge device applications. We propose MultiScaleSleepNet, a hybrid convolutional neural network-bidirectional long short-term memory-transformer architecture that extracts multiscale temporal and spectral features through parallel convolutional branches, followed by sequential modeling using a BiLSTM memory network and transformer-based attention mechanisms. The model obtained an accuracy, macro-averaged F1 score, and kappa coefficient of 88.6%, 0.833, and 0.84 on the Sleep-EDF dataset; 85.6%, 0.811, and 0.80 on the Sleep-EDF Expanded dataset; and 84.6%, 0.745, and 0.79 on the SHHS dataset. Ablation studies indicate that attention mechanisms and spectral fusion consistently improve performance, with the most notable gains observed for stages N1, N3, and rapid eye movement. MultiScaleSleepNet demonstrates competitive performance across multiple benchmark datasets while maintaining a compact size of 1.9 million parameters, suggesting robustness to variations in dataset size and class distribution. The study supports the feasibility of real-time, accurate sleep staging from single-channel EEG using parameter-efficient deep models suitable for portable systems.