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Music Recommendations; Approximating user distributions to address the cold start problem

Hammarstedt, Johan LU (2020) STAH11 20192
Department of Statistics
Abstract (Swedish)
In today's data driven society the world is at a point of information overload. As people rely on Google for information and other platforms such as Netflix and Spotify for entertainment, the need for relevant filtering of content has never been higher. As a result, recommendation systems have seen a great surge in demand. One can divide the space of recommendation algorithms into primarily two approaches. In the context of music,a collaborative based one where underlying correlations between users dictate the model, and the content based approach which examines the more specific relationship each user has to the songs. This paper aims to highlight the issues many collaborative models face when there is a lack uneven amount of interactions... (More)
In today's data driven society the world is at a point of information overload. As people rely on Google for information and other platforms such as Netflix and Spotify for entertainment, the need for relevant filtering of content has never been higher. As a result, recommendation systems have seen a great surge in demand. One can divide the space of recommendation algorithms into primarily two approaches. In the context of music,a collaborative based one where underlying correlations between users dictate the model, and the content based approach which examines the more specific relationship each user has to the songs. This paper aims to highlight the issues many collaborative models face when there is a lack uneven amount of interactions with the songs; this is usually the case for less popular or new items. To address this, a content based approach is suggested based on music feature data with the goal to distinguish unique user distributions based on song characteristics. After evaluating this method against a popularity based baseline model, there was a small but not significant difference in the error. This suggested that there are a lot of room for improvement in the approximation of user distributions, leading to the conclusion that with more elaborative methods one could most likely expand upon this research and build strong recommendations based on the idea of probabilistic user distributions. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Hammarstedt, Johan LU
supervisor
organization
course
STAH11 20192
year
type
M2 - Bachelor Degree
subject
keywords
Music recommendation, content based filtering, collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, user-feature distribution
language
English
id
9007105
date added to LUP
2020-03-27 07:44:20
date last changed
2020-03-27 07:44:20
@misc{9007105,
  abstract     = {{In today's data driven society the world is at a point of information overload. As people rely on Google for information and other platforms such as Netflix and Spotify for entertainment, the need for relevant filtering of content has never been higher. As a result, recommendation systems have seen a great surge in demand. One can divide the space of recommendation algorithms into primarily two approaches. In the context of music,a collaborative based one where underlying correlations between users dictate the model, and the content based approach which examines the more specific relationship each user has to the songs. This paper aims to highlight the issues many collaborative models face when there is a lack uneven amount of interactions with the songs; this is usually the case for less popular or new items. To address this, a content based approach is suggested based on music feature data with the goal to distinguish unique user distributions based on song characteristics. After evaluating this method against a popularity based baseline model, there was a small but not significant difference in the error. This suggested that there are a lot of room for improvement in the approximation of user distributions, leading to the conclusion that with more elaborative methods one could most likely expand upon this research and build strong recommendations based on the idea of probabilistic user distributions.}},
  author       = {{Hammarstedt, Johan}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Music Recommendations; Approximating user distributions to address the cold start problem}},
  year         = {{2020}},
}