Cross-scenario automatic sleep stage classification using transfer learning and single-channel EEG

Sleep staging via manual inspection is time-consuming and inefficient, and as such, automatic sleep stage classification methods have been proposed and successfully implemented. However, these conventional super-vised learning models are not suitable for cross-scenario sleep staging tasks due to the shift data distribution problem. This study aims to explore the use of transfer learning to transfer knowledge from a labeled source dataset to a new target domain where labels are difficult to obtain, so as to help solve the classification problem in a new domain in practical sleep staging scenarios. A novel end-to-end deep learning network that includes a feature extractor, a sleep stage classifier, and a domain adaptation network was proposed. The proposed domain adaptation network can accomplish distribution alignment between source and target domains, through the application of both joint distribution loss and stage transition loss. Cross-channel, cross-subject and channel, and cross-dataset experiments were designed to verify the feasibility of the proposed network using three publicly available datasets. The results indicate an average accuracy improvement ranging from 0.1% to 6.1% (average of 2.9%), a macro-averaging F1-score improvement ranging from 0.1% to 5.1% (average of 2.6%), and a Cohen's kappa coefficient improvement ranging from 0.016 to 0.083 (average of 0.045) after using transfer learning, when compared with a non-transfer model. Relative to similar existing transfer learning methods for sleep staging, the proposed method was implemented in an unsupervised manner and achieved success in cross -scenario sleep staging tasks, which is more suitable for practical applications in daily life.