An EEG-based machine learning framework for diagnosing acute sleep deprivation

Study objective: Acute sleep deprivation significantly impacts cognitive function, contributes to accidents, and increases the risk of chronic illnesses, underscoring the need for reliable and objective diagnosis. Our work aims to develop a machine learning-based approach to discriminate between EEG recordings from acutely sleep-deprived individuals and those that are well-rested, facilitating the objective detection of acute sleep deprivation and enabling timely intervention to mitigate its adverse effects. Methods: Sixty-one-channel eyes-open resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) data from a publicly available dataset of 71 participants were analyzed. Following preprocessing, EEG recordings were segmented into contiguous, non-overlapping 20-second epochs. For each epoch, a comprehensive set of features was extracted, including statistical descriptors, spectral measures, functional connectivity indices, and graph-theoretic metrics. Four machine learning classifiers - Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LightGBM), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Classifier (SVC) - were trained on these features using nested stratified cross-validation to ensure unbiased performance evaluation. In parallel, three deep learning models-a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM), and Transformer-were trained directly on the raw multi-channel EEG time-series data. All models were evaluated under two conditions: (i) without subject-level separation, allowing the same participant to contribute to both training and test sets, and (ii) with subject-level separation, where models were tested exclusively on unseen participants. Model performance was assessed using accuracy, F1-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results: Without subject-level separation, CNN achieved the highest accuracy (95.72%), followed by XGBoost (95.42%), LightGBM (94.83%), RF (94.53%), and SVC (85.25%), with the Transformer (77.39%) and LSTM (66.75%) models achieving lower accuracies. Under subject-level separation, RF achieved the highest accuracy (68.23%), followed by XGBoost (66.36%), LightGBM (66.21%), CNN (65.35%), and SVC (65.08%), while the Transformer (63.35%) and LSTM (61.70%) models achieved the lowest accuracies. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the potential of EEG-based machine learning for detecting acute sleep deprivation, while underscoring the challenges of achieving robust subject-level generalization. Despite reduced accuracy under cross-subject evaluation, these findings support the feasibility of developing scalable, non-invasive tools for sleep deprivation detection using EEG and advanced ML techniques.

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