Convolution- and Attention-Based Neural Network for Automated Sleep Stage Classification

Analyzing polysomnography (PSG) is an effective method for evaluating sleep health; however, the sleep stage scoring required for PSG analysis is a time-consuming effort for an experienced medical expert. When scoring sleep epochs, experts pay attention to find specific signal characteristics (e.g., K-complexes and spindles), and sometimes need to integrate information from preceding and subsequent epochs in order to make a decision. To imitate this process and to build a more interpretable deep learning model, we propose a neural network based on a convolutional network (CNN) and attention mechanism to perform automatic sleep staging. The CNN learns local signal characteristics, and the attention mechanism excels in learning inter- and intra-epoch features. In experiments on the public sleep-edf and sleep-edfx databases with different training and testing set partitioning methods, our model achieved overall accuracies of 93.7% and 82.8%, and macro-average F1-scores of 84.5 and 77.8, respectively, outperforming recently reported machine learning-based methods.