Alternating diffusion for common manifold learning with application to sleep stage assessment

In this paper, we address the problem of multimodal signal processing and present a manifold learning method to extract the common source of variability from multiple measurements. This method is based on alternating-diffusion and is particularly adapted to time series. We show that the common source of variability is extracted from multiple sensors as if it were the only source of variability, extracted by a standard manifold learning method from a single sensor, without the influence of the sensor-specific variables. In addition, we present application to sleep stage assessment. We demonstrate that, indeed, through alternating-diffusion, the sleep information hidden inside multimodal respiratory signals can be better captured compared to single-modal methods.