A novel machine learning unsupervised algorithm for sleep/wake identification using actigraphy

Actigraphy is widely used in sleep studies but lacks a universal unsupervised algorithm for sleep/wake identification. An unsupervised algorithm is useful in large-scale population studies and in cases where polysomnography (PSG) is unavailable, as it does not require sleep outcome labels to train the model but utilizes information solely contained in actigraphy to learn sleep and wake characteristics and separate the two states. In this study, we proposed a machine learning unsupervised algorithm based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for sleep/wake identification. The proposed algorithm is also an individualized approach that takes into account individual variabilities and analyzes each individual actigraphy profile separately to infer sleep and wake states. We used Actiwatch and PSG data from 43 individuals in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis study to evaluate the method performance. Epoch-by-epoch comparisons and sleep variable comparisons were made between our algorithm, the unsupervised algorithm embedded in the Actiwatch software (AS), and the pre-trained supervised UCSD algorithm. Using PSG as the reference, the accuracy was 85.7% for HMM, 84.7% for AS, and 85.0% for UCSD. The sensitivity was 99.3%, 99.7%, and 98.9% for HMM, AS, and UCSD, respectively, and the specificity was 36.4%, 30.0%, and 31.7%, respectively. The Kappa statistic was 0.446 for HMM, 0.399 for AS, and 0.311 for UCSD, suggesting fair to moderate agreement between PSG and actigraphy. The Bland-Altman plots further show that the total sleep time, sleep latency, and sleep efficiency estimates by HMM were closer to PSG with narrower 95% limits of agreement than AS and UCSD. All three methods tend to overestimate sleep and underestimate wake compared to PSG. Our HMM approach is also able to differentiate relatively active and sedentary individuals by quantifying variabilities in activity counts: individuals with higher estimated activity variabilities tend to show more frequent sedentary behaviors. Our unsupervised data-driven HMM algorithm achieved better performance than the commonly used Actiwatch software algorithm and the pre-trained UCSD algorithm. HMM can help expand the application of actigraphy in cases where PSG is hard to acquire and supervised methods cannot be trained. In addition, the estimated HMM parameters can characterize individual activity patterns and sedentary tendencies that can be further utilized in downstream analysis.