Decision System Integrating Preferences to Support Sleep Staging

Scoring sleep stages can be considered as a classification problem. Once the whole recording segmented into 30-seconds epochs, features, extracted from raw signals, are typically injected into machine learning algorithms in order to build a model able to assign a sleep stage, trying to mimic what experts have done on the training set. Such approaches ignore the advances in sleep medicine, in which guidelines have been published by the AASM, providing definitions and rules that should be followed to score sleep stages. In addition, these approaches are not able to solve conflict situations, in which criteria of different sleep stages are met. This work proposes a novel approach based on AASM guidelines. Rules are formalized integrating, for some of them, preferences allowing to support decision in conflict situations. Applied to a doubtful epoch, our approach has taken the appropriate decision.