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In this work we examine some of the problems associated with the development of machine learning models with the objective to achieve robust generalization capabilities on common-task multiple-database scenarios. Referred to as the "database variability problem", we focus on a specific medical domain (sleep staging in sleep medicine) to show the non-triviality of translating the estimated model's local generalization capabilities into independent external databases. We analyze some of the scalability problems when multiple-database data are used as inputs to train a single learning model. Then, we introduce a novel approach based on an ensemble of local models, and we show its advantages in terms of inter-database generalization performance and data scalability. In addition, we analyze different model configurations and data pre-processing techniques to determine their effects on the overall generalization performance. For this purpose, we carry out experimentation that involves several sleep databases and evaluates different machine learning models based on convolutional neural networks, Comment: Pre-print version accepted for publication; 26 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables, 4 supplementary tables

Sleep stages classification is a crucial task in the context of sleep studies. It involves the simultaneous analysis of multiple signals recorded during sleep. However, it is complex and tedious, and even the trained expert can spend several hours scoring a single night recording. Multiple automatic methods have tried to solve these problems in the past, most of them by classifying a feature vector that is engineered for a specific dataset. In this work, we avoid this bias using a deep learning model that learns relevant features without human intervention. Particularly, we propose an ensemble of 5 convolutional networks that achieves a kappa index of 0.83 when classifying a dataset of 500 sleep recordings., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

This article deals with the problem of the uncertainty in rule-based systems (RBS), but from the perspective of quantum computing (QC). In this work we first remember the characteristics of Quantum Rule-Based Systems (QRBS), a concept defined in a previous article by one of the authors of this paper, and we introduce the problem of quantum uncertainty. We assume that the subjective uncertainty that affects the facts of classical RBSs can be treated as a direct consequence of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics (QM), and we also assume that the uncertainty associated with a given hypothesis is a consequence of the propagation of the imprecision through the inferential circuits of RBSs. This article does not intend to contribute anything new to the QM field: it is a work of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses QC techniques to solve the problem of uncertainty in RBSs. Bearing the above arguments in mind a quantum model is proposed. This model has been applied to a problem already defined by one of the authors of this work in a previous publication and which is briefly described in this article. Then the model is generalized, and it is thoroughly evaluated. The results obtained show that QC is a valid, effective and efficient method to deal with the inherent uncertainty of RBSs, Comment: 20 pages, 8 tables, 7 figures

$\textbf{Objective}$: To assess the validity of an automatic EEG arousal detection algorithm using large patient samples and different heterogeneous databases $\textbf{Methods}$: Automatic scorings were confronted with results from human expert scorers on a total of 2768 full-night PSG recordings obtained from two different databases. Of them, 472 recordings were obtained during clinical routine at our sleep center and were subdivided into two subgroups of 220 (HMC-S) and 252 (HMC-M) recordings each, attending to the procedure followed by the clinical expert during the visual review (semi-automatic or purely manual, respectively). In addition, 2296 recordings from the public SHHS-2 database were evaluated against the respective manual expert scorings. $\textbf{Results}$: Event-by-event epoch-based validation resulted in an overall Cohen kappa agreement K = 0.600 (HMC-S), 0.559 (HMC-M), and 0.573 (SHHS-2). Estimated inter-scorer variability on the datasets was, respectively, K = 0.594, 0.561 and 0.543. Analyses of the corresponding Arousal Index scores showed associated automatic-human repeatability indices ranging in 0.693-0.771 (HMC-S), 0.646-0.791 (HMC-M), and 0.759-0.791 (SHHS-2). $\textbf{Conclusions}$: Large-scale validation of our automatic EEG arousal detector on different databases has shown robust performance and good generalization results comparable to the expected levels of human agreement. Special emphasis has been put on allowing reproducibility of the results and implementation of our method has been made accessible online as open source code, Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables; typos corrected; format improved