Classification of Sleep Stages Using Multi-wavelet Time Frequency Entropy and LDA

Abstract

Background: The process of automatic sleep stage scoring consists of two major parts: feature extraction and classification. Features are normally extracted from the polysomno- graphic recordings, mainly electroencephalo- graph (EEG) signals. The EEG is considered a non-stationary signal which increases the complexity of the detection of different waves in it. Objectives: This work presents a new tech- nique for automatic sleep stage scoring based on employing continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) using different mother wavelets to detect dif- ferent waves embedded in the EEG signal. Methods: The use of different mother wave- lets increases the ability to detect waves in the EEG signal. The extracted features were formed based on CWT time frequency entropy using three mother wavelets, and the classi- fication was performed using the linear dis- criminant analysis. Thirty-two data sets from the MIT-BIH database were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results: Features of a single EEG signal were extracted successfully based on the time fre- quency entropy using the continuous wavelet transform with three mother wavelets. The proposed method has shown to outperform the classification based on a CWT using a single mother wavelet. The accuracy was found to be 0.84, while the kappa coefficient was 0.78. Conclusions: This work has shown that wavelet time frequency entropy provides a powerful tool for feature extraction for the non-stationary EEG signal; the accuracy of the classification procedure improved when using multiple wavelets compared to the use of single wavelet time frequency entropy.