A Systematic Evaluation of Self-Supervised Learning for Label-Efficient Sleep Staging with Wearable EEG
To address the scarcity of labeled data and high annotation costs for wearable EEG-based sleep staging, this work presents the first systematic investigation of self-supervised learning (SSL) in this domain. We propose three evaluation paradigms and conduct comprehensive comparisons of leading SSL methods on two real-world datasets—BOAS and HOGAR. Results demonstrate that SSL models achieve >80% accuracy using only 5–10% labeled data, outperforming fully supervised baselines by approximately 10%. Crucially, these models exhibit strong generalization across diverse populations, recording environments, and low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. This study not only validates the efficacy of SSL for resource-constrained neurophysiological signal analysis but also establishes a low-labeling benchmark framework for wearable EEG sleep staging—substantially lowering barriers to clinical deployment.