Beyond the Ground Truth, XGBoost Model Applied to Sleep Spindle Event Detection

Sleep spindles are microevents of the electroencephalogram (EEG) during sleep whose functional interpretation is not fully clear. To streamline the identification process and make it more replicable, multiple automatic detectors have been proposed in the literature. Among these methods, algorithms based on deep learning usually demonstrate superior accuracy in performance assessment up to now. However, using these methods, the rationale behind the model decision-making process is hard to understand. In this study, we propose a novel machine-learning detection framework (SpinCo) based on an exhaustive sliding window feature extraction and the application of XGBoost algorithm, achieving performance close to state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques while depending on a fixed set of easily interpretable features. Additionally, we have developed a novel by-event metric for evaluation that ensures symmetricity and allows a probabilistic interpretation of the results. Through the utilization of this metric, we have enhanced the interpretability of our evaluations and enabled a direct assessment of inter-expert agreement in the manual annotation of spindle events. Finally, we propose a new type of performance assessment test based on estimations of the automatic method's ability to generalize to unseen experts and its comparison with inter-expert agreement measurements. Hence, SpinCo is a robust automatic spindle detection technique that can be used for labeling raw EEG signals and shed light on the metrics used for evaluation in this problem.