From unsupervised to semi-supervised adversarial domain adaptation in electroencephalography-based sleep staging

Abstract

Objective. The recent breakthrough of wearable sleep monitoring devices has resulted in large amounts of sleep data. However, as limited labels are available, interpreting these data requires automated sleep stage classification methods with a small need for labeled training data. Transfer learning and domain adaptation offer possible solutions by enabling models to learn on a source dataset and adapt to a target dataset. Approach. In this paper, we investigate adversarial domain adaptation applied to real use cases with wearable sleep datasets acquired from diseased patient populations. Different practical aspects of the adversarial domain adaptation framework are examined, including the added value of (pseudo-)labels from the target dataset and the influence of domain mismatch between the source and target data. The method is also implemented for personalization to specific patients. Main results. The results show that adversarial domain adaptation is effective in the application of sleep staging on wearable data. When compared to a model applied on a target dataset without any adaptation, the domain adaptation method in its simplest form achieves relative gains of 7%–27% in accuracy. The performance in the target domain is further boosted by adding pseudo-labels and real target domain labels when available, and by choosing an appropriate source dataset. Furthermore, unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation can also personalize a model, improving the performance by 1%–2% compared to a non-personalized model. Significance. In conclusion, adversarial domain adaptation provides a flexible framework for semi-supervised and unsupervised transfer learning. This is particularly useful in sleep staging and other wearable electroencephalography applications. (Clinical trial registration number: S64190.)