An accurate sleep stages classification system using a new class of optimally time-frequency localized three-band wavelet filter bank

Sleep related disorder causes diminished quality of lives in human beings. Sleep scoring or sleep staging is the process of classifying various sleep stages which helps to detect the quality of sleep. The identification of sleep-stages using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is an arduous task. Just by looking at an EEG signal, one cannot determine the sleep stages precisely. Sleep specialists may make errors in identifying sleep stages by visual inspection. To mitigate the erroneous identification and to reduce the burden on doctors, a computer-aided EEG based system can be deployed in the hospitals, which can help identify the sleep stages, correctly. Several automated systems based on the analysis of polysomnographic (PSG) signals have been proposed. A few sleep stage scoring systems using EEG signals have also been proposed. But, still there is a need for a robust and accurate portable system developed using huge dataset. In this study, we have developed a new single-channel EEG based sleep-stages identification system using a novel set of wavelet-based features extracted from a large EEG dataset. We employed a novel three-band time-frequency localized (TBTFL) wavelet filter bank (FB). The EEG signals are decomposed using three-level wavelet decomposition, yielding seven sub-bands (SBs). This is followed by the computation of discriminating features namely, log-energy (LE), signal-fractal-dimensions (SFD), and signal-sample-entropy (SSE) from all seven SBs. The extracted features are ranked and fed to the support vector machine (SVM) and other supervised learning classifiers. In this study, we have considered five different classification problems (CPs), (two-class (CP-1), three-class (CP-2), four-class (CP-3), five-class (CP-4) and six-class (CP-5)). The proposed system yielded accuracies of 98.3%, 93.9%, 92.1%, 91.7%, and 91.5% for CP-1 to CP-5, respectively, using 10-fold cross validation (CV) technique.