EEG-Based Neonatal Sleep Stage Classification Using Ensemble Learning

Sleep stage classification can provide important information regarding neonatal brain development and maturation. Visual annotation, using polysomnography (PSG), is considered as a gold standard for neonatal sleep stage classification. However, visual annotation is time consuming and needs professional neurologists. For this reason, an internet of things and ensemble-based automatic sleep stage classification has been proposed in this study. 12 EEG features, from 9 bipolar channels, were used to train and test the base classifiers including convolutional neural network, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron. Bagging and stacking ensembles are then used to combine the outputs for final classification. The proposed algorithm can reach a mean kappa of 0.73 and 0.66 for 2-stage and 3-stage (wake, active sleep, and quiet sleep) classification, respectively. The proposed network works as a semi-real time application because a smoothing filter is used to hold the sleep stage for 3 min. The high-performance parameters and its ability to work in semi real-time makes it a promising candidate for use in hospitalized newborn infants.