Employing a Convolutional Neural Network to Classify Sleep Stages from EEG Signals Using Feature Reduction Techniques

Abstract

One of the most essential components of human life is sleep. One of the first steps in spotting abnormalities connected to sleep is classifying sleep stages. Based on the kind and frequency of signals obtained during a polysomnography test, sleep phases can be separated into groups. Accurate classification of sleep stages from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals plays a crucial role in sleep disorder diagnosis and treatment. This study proposes a novel approach that combines feature selection techniques with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to enhance the classification performance of sleep stages using EEG signals. Firstly, a comprehensive feature selection process was employed to extract discriminative features from raw EEG data, aiming to reduce dimensionality and enhance the efficiency of subsequent classification using mutual information (MI) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) after splitting the dataset into two sets—the training set (70%) and testing set (30%)—then processing it using the standard scalar method. Subsequently, a 1D-CNN architecture was designed to automatically learn hierarchical representations of the selected features, capturing complex patterns indicative of different sleep stages. The proposed method was evaluated on a publicly available EDF-Sleep dataset, demonstrating superior performance compared to traditional approaches. The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating feature selection with CNNs in improving the accuracy and reliability of sleep stage classification from EEG signals, which reached 99.84% with MI-50. This approach not only contributes to advancing the field of sleep disorder diagnosis, but also holds promise for developing more efficient and robust clinical decision support systems.