Utilizing Multi-Class Classification Methods for Automated Sleep Disorder Prediction

Abstract

Even from infancy, a human’s day-life alternates from a period of wakefulness to a period of sleep at night, during the 24-hour cycle. Sleep is a normal process necessary for human physical and mental health. A lack of sleep makes it difficult to control emotions and behaviour, reduces productivity at work, and can even increase stress or depression. In addition, poor sleep affects health; when sleep is insufficient, the chances of developing serious diseases greatly increase. Researchers in sleep medicine have identified an extensive list of sleep disorders, and thus leveraged Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate their analysis and gain a deeper understanding of sleep patterns and related disorders. In this research, we seek a Machine Learning (ML) solution that will allow for efficient classification of unlabeled instances as being Sleep Apnea, Insomnia or Normal (subjects without a specific sleep disorder) by assessing the performance of two well-established strategies for multi-class classification tasks: the One-Vs-All (OVA) and One-Vs-One (OVO). In the context of the specific strategies, two well-known binary classification models were assumed, Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Both strategies’ validity was verified upon a dataset of diverse information related to the profiles (anthropometric data, sleep metrics, lifestyle and cardiovascular health factors) of potential patients or individuals not exhibiting any specific sleep disorder. Performance evaluation was carried out by comparing the weighted average results in all involved classes that represent these two specific sleep disorders and no-disorder occurrence; accuracy, kappa score, precision, recall, f-measure, and Area Under the ROC curve (AUC) were recorded and compared to identify an effective and robust model and strategy, both class-wise and on average. The experimental evaluation unveiled that after feature selection, 2-degree polynomial SVM under both strategies was the least complex and most efficient, recording an accuracy of 91.44%, a kappa score of 84.97%, precision, recall and f-measure equal to 0.914, and an AUC of 0.927.