Attentive Dilated Convolution for Automatic Sleep Staging using Force-directed Layout

Sleep stages play an important role in identifying sleep patterns and diagnosing sleep disorders. In this study, we present an automated sleep stage classifier called the Attentive Dilated Convolutional Neural Network (AttDiCNN), which uses deep learning methodologies to address challenges related to data heterogeneity, computational complexity, and reliable and automatic sleep staging. We employed a force-directed layout based on the visibility graph to capture the most significant information from the EEG signals, thereby representing the spatial-temporal features. The proposed network consists of three modules: the Localized Spatial Feature Extraction Network (LSFE), Spatio-Temporal-Temporal Long Retention Network (S2TLR), and Global Averaging Attention Network (G2A). The LSFE captures spatial information from sleep data, the S2TLR is designed to extract the most pertinent information in long-term contexts, and the G2A reduces computational overhead by aggregating information from the LSFE and S2TLR. We evaluated the performance of our model on three comprehensive and publicly accessible datasets, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies of 98.56%, 99.66%, and 99.08% for the EDFX, HMC, and NCH datasets, respectively, while maintaining a low computational complexity with 1.4 M parameters. Our proposed architecture surpasses existing methodologies in several performance metrics, thereby proving its potential as an automated tool for clinical settings.