Assessing the importance of long-range correlations for deep-learning-based sleep staging

This study aims to elucidate the significance of long-range correlations for deep-learning-based sleep staging. It is centered around S4Sleep(TS), a recently proposed model for automated sleep staging. This model utilizes electroencephalography (EEG) as raw time series input and relies on structured state space sequence (S4) models as essential model component. Although the model already surpasses state-of-the-art methods for a moderate number of 15 input epochs, recent literature results suggest potential benefits from incorporating very long correlations spanning hundreds of input epochs. In this submission, we explore the possibility of achieving further enhancements by systematically scaling up the model's input size, anticipating potential improvements in prediction accuracy. In contrast to findings in literature, our results demonstrate that augmenting the input size does not yield a significant enhancement in the performance of S4Sleep(TS). These findings, coupled with the distinctive ability of S4 models to capture long-range dependencies in time series data, cast doubt on the diagnostic relevance of very long-range interactions for sleep staging.