Use of features from RR-time series and EEG signals for automated classification of sleep stages in deep neural network framework

Sleep is a physiological activity and human body restores itself from various diseases during sleep. It is necessary to get sufficient amount of sleep to have sound physiological and mental health. Nowadays, due to our present hectic lifestyle, the amount of sound sleep is reduced. It is very difficult to decipher the various stages of sleep manually. Hence, an automated system may be useful to detect the different stages of sleep. This paper presents a novel method for the classification of sleep stages based on RR-time series and electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. The method uses iterative filtering (IF) based multiresolution analysis approach for the decomposition of RR-time series into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The delta (δ), theta (θ), alpha (α), beta (β) and gamma (γ) waves are evaluated from EEG signal using band-pass filtering. The recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) and dispersion entropy (DE) based features are evaluated from the IMFs of RR-time series. The dispersion entropy and the variance features are evaluated from the different bands of EEG signal. The RR-time series features and the EEG features coupled with the deep neural network (DNN) are used for the classification of sleep stages. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method has achieved an average accuracy of 85.51%, 94.03% and 95.71% for the classification of ‘sleep vs wake’, ‘light sleep vs deep sleep’ and ‘rapid eye movement (REM) vs non-rapid eye movement (NREM)’ sleep stages.