Staging study of single-channel sleep EEG signals based on data augmentation

Introduction Accurate sleep staging is an essential basis for sleep quality assessment and plays an important role in sleep quality research. However, the occupancy of different sleep stages is unbalanced throughout the sleep process, which makes the EEG datasets of different sleep stages have a class imbalance, which will eventually affect the automatic assessment of sleep stages. Method In this paper, we propose a Residual Dense Block and Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (RDB-DCGAN) data augmentation model based on the DCGAN and RDB, which takes two-dimensional continuous wavelet time–frequency maps as input, expands the minority class of sleep EEG data and later performs sleep staging by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Results and discussion The results of the CNN classification comparison test with the publicly available dataset Sleep-EDF show that the overall sleep staging accuracy of each stage after data augmentation is improved by 6%, especially the N1 stage, which has low classification accuracy due to less original data, also has a significant improvement of 19%. It is fully verified that data augmentation by improving the DCGAN model can effectively improve the classification problem of the class imbalance sleep dataset.