Classification of sleep stages based on LSTAR model

Sleep study is very important in the health since sleep disorders affect the productivity of individuals. One of the important topics in sleep research is the classification of sleep stages using the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. Electrical activities of brain are measured by EEG signal in the laboratory. In real-world environments, EEG signal is also used in portable monitoring devices to analyze sleep. In this study, we propose an efficient method for classification of sleep stages. EEG signals are examined by a new model from autoregressive (AR) family, namely logistic smooth transition autoregressive (LSTAR) to study sleep process. In contrast to the AR model, LSTAR is a non-linear one; therefore, it is suitable for modeling non-linear signals such as EEG. In the current research, at first, each 30-second epoch of EEG signal is decomposed into the time-frequency sub-bands using the double-density dual-tree discrete wavelet transform (D3TDWT). In the second step, LSTAR model is used for feature extraction from each sub-band. Next, the dimension of feature vector is reduced by tensor locality preserving projection (tensor LPP) method, and then the obtained features are given to classifier to determine the stage of each epoch based on the number of considered classes. After classifying sleep stages, some misclassified epochs can be corrected according to the smoothing rule. We consider different classifiers and evaluate their performance. The results indicate the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with the recently introduced methods in terms of accuracy and Kappa coefficient.