Abstract
The precise measurement of sleep stages is crucial for evaluating sleep
quality. Deep learning has recently been utilized for automatic sleep
stage classification, demonstrating exceptional performance. Previous
studies on deep learning-based sleep stage classification assumed
stationary data generation environments, where samples were drawn from
fixed – albeit unknown – unknown distributions and annotated based on
predefined criteria. However, this assumption of a stationary
distribution is no longer valid in real-world applications due to shifts
in data distribution between new and old datasets and changes in
classification tasks. Moreover, the unavailability of historical data
often poses challenges in training deep learning models. Sleep stage
classification faces challenges associated with evolving data
acquisition, changing patient demographics, and shifting annotation
criteria over time. This paper addresses the classification of sleep
stages with varying data distributions, missing historical datasets, and
changing label granularity for the first time. We proposed learning
strategies for addressing the challenges described above, as well as
constructed benchmarks for evaluating the proposed learning strategies.
The results demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the
proposed learning strategies. These findings provide compelling evidence
for the significance and impact of this work. Furthermore, a
comprehensive discussion is presented, highlighting the limitations of
our approach, and proposing several avenues for future research.