Efficient feature selection for sleep staging based on maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform and SVM

In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed with application in sleep/awake detection and in multiclass sleep stage classification (awake, non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and REM sleep). In turn, NREM is further divided into three stages denoted here by S1, S2, and S3. Six electroencephalographic (EEG) and two electro-oculographic (EOG) channels were used in this study. The maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT) with the multi-resolution Analysis is applied to extract relevant features from EEG and EOG signals. The extracted feature set is transformed and normalized to reduce the effect of extreme values of features. A set of significant features are selected by mRMR which is a powerful feature selection method. Finally the selected feature set is classified using support vector machines (SVMs). The system achieved 95.0% of average accuracy for sleep/awake detection. As concerns the multiclass case, the average accuracy of sleep stages classification was 93.0%.