Skip to content
#machine learning Preprint Open access

Spectral Features Dominate BCG Respiratory-Event Detection: A Large-Scale Patient-Independent Comparison of Feature Groups in Sleep Apnea Patients

Israel Campero Jurado Zoe Bousraou Lara Benning Sara Padilla Neira Alexander Breuss Robert Riener Esther Irene Schwarz Elisabeth Wilhelm
Aug 2026
Machine Learning

Abstract

Unobtrusive ballistocardiographic (BCG) sensing is a promising modality for long-term sleep-apnea monitoring, yet it remains unclear which signal features are most discriminative for respiratory-event detection. We present a literature-guided, patient-independent comparison of ten BCG feature groups using a 512-sensor capacitive pressure mat recorded simultaneously with respiratory polygraphy in 155 patients (52 female, 103 male) undergoing in-hospital evaluation for obstructive sleep apnea. Features were extracted from six spatially distinct signal channels, yielding a 191-dimensional feature vector spanning general statistical, time-domain, frequency-domain, wavelet, frame-energy, and nonlinear complexity descriptors. Under strict leave-one-patient-out cross-validation for binary classification of respiratory-event windows versus event-free reference windows, Random Forest and Histogram Gradient Boosting achieved AUC-ROC of 0.967 and 0.969 and AUC-PR of 0.977 and 0.979, respectively. Feature-importance analysis revealed that frequency-domain features dominate discrimination: breathing-band power in the 0.1-0.4 Hz range accounted for 30.3% of total discriminative information across all spatial channels, and Fast Fourier Transform spectral-shape descriptors of the adaptively preprocessed channel contributed a further 15.1%. AUC and curve-length features provided the main complementary time-domain evidence (21.5%), whereas wavelet-derived and nonlinear features contributed smaller secondary effects (10.4% combined across 59 features). Frequency-domain and time-domain features together accounted for 67% of total discriminative information, demonstrating that a compact, interpretable subset of the full feature library achieves clinically relevant performance under patient-independent validation and providing an empirical basis for feature selection in future BCG systems.

View source

Similar papers

#machine learning Open access Oct 2020

Physics-Informed and Hybrid Machine Learning in Additive Manufacturing: Application to Fused Filament Fabrication

This article investigates several physics-informed and hybrid machine learning strategies that incorporate physics knowledge in experimental data-driven deep-learning models for predicting the bond quality and porosity of fused filament fabrication (FFF) parts. Three types of strategies are explored to incorporate physics constraints and multi-physics FFF simulation results into a deep neural network (DNN), thus ensuring consistency with physical laws: (1) incorporate physics constraints within the loss function of the DNN, (2) use physics model outputs as additional inputs to the DNN model, and (3) pre-train a DNN model with physics model input-output and then update it with experimental data. These strategies help to enforce a physically consistent relationship between bond quality and tensile strength, thus making porosity predictions physically meaningful. Eight different combinations of the above strategies are investigated. The results show how the combination of multiple strategies produces accurate machine learning models even with limited experimental data.

B. Kapusuzoglu, S. Mahadevan · 79 citations · ⚡2

Spikformer V2: Join the High Accuracy Club on ImageNet with an SNN Ticket

This work introduces a pioneering exploration of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) within the SNN, and proposes a novel Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) and Spiking Transformer (Spikformer) that achieves 80+% accuracy on ImageNet.

Zhaokun Zhou, Kaiwei Che, Wei Fang et al. · 69 citations · ⚡10
#machine learning Open access May 2021

Information fusion and machine learning for sensitivity analysis using physics knowledge and experimental data

This paper considers global sensitivity analysis (GSA) for situations where both a physics-based model and experimental observations are available, and investigates physics-informed machine learning strategies to effectively combine the two sources of information in order to maximize the accuracy of the sensitivity estimate.

B. Kapusuzoglu, S. Mahadevan · 45 citations
#machine learning Conference Open access Feb 2023

EquiPocket: an E(3)-Equivariant Geometric Graph Neural Network for Ligand Binding Site Prediction

EquiPocket is proposed, an E(3)-equivariant Graph Neural Network for binding site prediction, which comprises three modules: the first one to extract local geometric information for each surface atom, the second one to model both the chemical and spatial structure of protein and the last one to capture the geometry of the surface via equivariant message passing over the surface atoms.

Yang Zhang, Wenbing Huang, Zhewei Wei et al. · 43 citations · ⚡4
#artificial intelligence Open access Oct 2022

Adaptive surrogate modeling for high-dimensional spatio-temporal output

An adaptive surrogate modeling method for problems with very high-dimensional spatio-temporal outputs is developed that combines exploration and exploitation to improve the surrogate model accuracy with the fewest possible runs of the expensive physics-based model.

B. Kapusuzoglu, S. Mahadevan, Shunsaku Matsumoto et al. · 17 citations
#machine learning Open access Nov 2022

Doubly robust nearest neighbors in factor models

An improved variant of nearest neighbors (NN) for estimation with missing data in latent factor models that provides a (near-)quadratic improvement in the non-asymptotic error and admits a significantly narrower asymptotic confidence interval when compared to both unit-unit or time-time NN.

Raaz Dwivedi, Katherine Tian, Sabina Tomkins et al. · 11 citations

Related blog posts

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 27, 2026

Looking beyond natural sequences

A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.