Label-Efficient Sleep Staging Using Transformers Pre-trained with Position Prediction

Sleep staging is a clinically important task for diagnosing various sleep disorders but remains challenging to deploy at scale because it requires clinical expertise, among other reasons. Deep learning models can perform the task but at the expense of large labeled datasets, which are unfeasible to procure at scale. While self-supervised learning (SSL) can mitigate this need, recent studies on SSL for sleep staging have shown performance gains saturate after training with labeled data from only tens of subjects, hence are unable to match peak performance attained with larger datasets. We…