Support vector machines for automated snoring detection: proof-of-concept

Abstract

Background Snoring has been shown to be associated with adverse physical and mental health, independent of the effects of sleep disordered breathing. Despite increasing evidence for the risks of snoring, few studies on sleep and health include objective measures of snoring. One reason for this methodological limitation is the difficulty of quantifying snoring. Conventional methods may rely on manual scoring of snore events by trained human scorers, but this process is both time- and labor-intensive, making the measurement of objective snoring impractical for large or multi-night studies. Methods The current study is a proof-of-concept to validate the use of support vector machines (SVM), a form of machine learning, for the automated scoring of an objective snoring signal. An SVM algorithm was trained and tested on a set of approximately 150,000 snoring and non-snoring data segments, and F-scores for SVM performance compared to visual scoring performance were calculated using the Wilcoxon signed rank test for paired data. Results The ability of the SVM algorithm to discriminate snore from non-snore segments of data did not differ statistically from visual scorer performance (SVM F-score=82.46 ± 7.93 versus average visual F-score=88.35 ± 4.61, p=0.2786), supporting SVM snore classification ability comparable to visual scorers. Conclusion In this proof-of-concept, we established that the SVM algorithm performs comparably to trained visual scorers, supporting the use of SVM for automated snoring detection in future studies.

Prediction of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Based on Respiratory Sounds Recorded Between Sleep Onset and Sleep Offset

“…Previous studies mainly focused on analyzing the characteristics of snoring, or distinguishing snoring from non-snoring sounds. One study reported that the classification performance of human visual scorers and a machine learning algorithm was similar in terms of automatically identifying snoring; this study used a support vector machine, which is a machine learning technique [14]. There have also been studies that used analysis of snoring sounds to predict the anatomical location in the upper airway where the snoring sounds were generated [15-17].…”

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