SUMMARYThere have been many trials in which the waveform recognition method, which is intended to replace expert observation by computer processing, has been used to extract the features of biological signals during sleep, and to automatically score sleep stages based on feature parameters. This paper proposes a waveform recognition method which extracts the feature parameters based on the characteristics of the biological signal during sleep, and a method of automatic sleep stage scoring by decision-tree learning, which is currently considered to be one of the most successful machine learning methods in practice. As the first step in the method, the features corresponding to the state of the EEG, the EOG, and the EMG during sleep are compared to the features of characteristic waves such as the α-wave, δ-wave, sleep spindle, K-complex, and REM, and the feature parameters needed in order to judge the sleep stage are extracted. Using canonical discriminant analysis and discretization method RWS based on the random walk, the feature parameters are converted to a small number of discrete variables. Based on training instances, obtained by the bootstrap method, a set of multiple small decision trees (a committee) is formed, and the sleep stage is scored by majority decision in the classification results. The method is applied to the PSG chart digital data provided by the Japan Sleep Society, and the performance of the system is evaluated experimentally. It is verified that the proposed method is promising as a method of automatic sleep stage scoring with high accuracy, requiring little expenditure of time in learning and classification.