Alleviating Class Imbalance Problem in Automatic Sleep Stage Classification

For real-world automatic sleep-stage classification tasks, various existing deep learning-based models are biased toward the majority with a high proportion. Because of the unique sleep structure, most of the current polysomnography (PSG) datasets suffer an inherent class imbalance problem (CIP), in which the number of each sleep stage is severely unequal. In this study, we first define the class imbalance factor (CIF) to describe the level of CIP quantitatively. Afterward, we propose two balancing methods to alleviate this problem from the dataset quantity and the relationship between the class distribution and the applied model, respectively. The first one is to employ the data augmentati…