P 113 The dynamics of human REM sleep investigated by the analysis of time dependent transition probabilities

Sleep can be conceptualized as a sequence of discernable vigilance states (sleep stages). When the polysomnogram is decomposed into bouts of subsequent epochs of the same sleep stage it can be shown from sufficiently large data bases that bout lengths follow a stochastic process characterized e.g. by exponential of power law distributions. A complementary method of analysis calculates the probability of transition to another stage dependent on the time spent in the initial stage (time dependent transition probabilities).

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