Many tasks in music information retrieval, such as recommendation, and playlist generation for online radio, fall naturally into the query-by-example setting, wherein a user queries the system by providing a song, and the system responds with a list of relevant or similar song recommendations. Such applications ultimately depend on the notion of similarity between items to produce high-quality results. Current state-of-the-art systems employ collaborative filter methods to represent musical items, effectively comparing items in terms of their constituent users. While collaborative filter techniques perform well when historical data is available for each item, their reliance on historical data impedes performance on novel or unpopular items. To combat this problem, practitioners rely on content-based similarity, which naturally extends to novel items, but is typically out-performed by collaborative filter methods. In this article, we propose a method for optimizing contentbased similarity by learning from a sample of collaborative filter data. The optimized content-based similarity metric can then be applied to answer queries on novel and unpopular items, while still maintaining high recommendation accuracy. The proposed system yields accurate and efficient representations of audio content, and experimental results show significant improvements in accuracy over competing content-based recommendation techniques.
Finally, there has been some previous work addressing the cold-start problem of collaborative filters for music recommendation by integrating audio content. Yoshii al. @cite_11 formulate a joint probabilistic model of both audio content and collaborative filter data in order to predict user ratings of songs (using either or both representations), whereas our goal here is to use audio data to predict the similarities derived from a collaborative filter. Our problem setting is most similar to that of Stenzel and Kamps @cite_44 , wherein a CF matrix was derived from playlist data, clustered into latent pseudo-genres,'' and classifiers were trained to predict the cluster membership of songs from audio data. Our proposed setting differs in that we derive similarity at the user level (not playlist level), and automatically learn the content-based song similarity that directly optimizes the primary quantity of interest in an information retrieval system: the quality of the rankings it induces.
@cite_44 @cite_11
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Although content is fundamental to our music listening preferences, the leading performance in music recommendation is achieved by collaborative-filtering-based methods which exploit the similarity patterns in user’s listening history rather than the audio content of songs. Meanwhile, collaborative filtering has the well-known “cold-start” problem, i.e., it is unable to work with new songs that no one has listened to. Efforts on incorporating content information into collaborative filtering methods have shown success in many non-musical applications, such as scientific article recommendation. Inspired by the related work, we train a neural network on semantic tagging information as a content model and use it as a prior in a collaborative filtering model. Such a system still allows the user listening data to “speak for itself”. The proposed system is evaluated on the Million Song Dataset and shows comparably better result than the collaborative filtering approaches, in addition to the favorable performance in the cold-start case. In the Internet music scene, where recommendation technology is key for navigating huge collections, large market players enjoy a considerable advantage. Accessing a wider pool of user feedback leads to an increasingly more accurate analysis of user tastes, effectively creating a "rich get richer" effect. This work aims at significantly lowering the entry barrier for creating music recommenders, through a paradigm coupling a public data source and a new collaborative filtering (CF) model. We claim that Internet radio stations form a readily available resource of abundant fresh human signals on music through their playlists, which are essentially cohesive sets of related tracks. In a way, our models rely on the knowledge of a diverse group of experts in lieu of the commonly used wisdom of crowds. Over several weeks, we aggregated publicly available playlists of thousands of Internet radio stations, resulting in a dataset encompassing millions of plays, and hundreds of thousands of tracks and artists. This provides the large scale ground data necessary to mitigate the cold start problem of new items at both mature and emerging services. Furthermore, we developed a new probabilistic CF model, tailored to the Internet radio resource. The success of the model was empirically validated on the collected dataset. Moreover, we tested the model at a cross-source transfer learning manner -- the same model trained on the Internet radio data was used to predict behavior of Yahoo! Music users. This demonstrates the ability to tap the Internet radio signals in other music recommendation setups. Based on encouraging empirical results, our hope is that the proposed paradigm will make quality music recommendation accessible to all interested parties in the community. Many tasks in music information retrieval, such as recommendation, and playlist generation for online radio, fall naturally into the query-by-example setting, wherein a user queries the system by providing a song, and the system responds with a list of relevant or similar song recommendations. Such applications ultimately depend on the notion of similarity between items to produce high-quality results. Current state-of-the-art systems employ collaborative filter methods to represent musical items, effectively comparing items in terms of their constituent users. While collaborative filter techniques perform well when historical data is available for each item, their reliance on historical data impedes performance on novel or unpopular items. To combat this problem, practitioners rely on content-based similarity, which naturally extends to novel items, but is typically outperformed by collaborative filter methods. In this paper, we propose a method for optimizing content-based similarity by learning from a sample of collaborative filter data. The optimized content-based similarity metric can then be applied to answer queries on novel and unpopular items, while still maintaining high recommendation accuracy. The proposed system yields accurate and efficient representations of audio content, and experimental results show significant improvements in accuracy over competing content-based recommendation techniques. Existing content-based music recommendation systems typically employ a approach. They first extract traditional audio content features such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and then predict user preferences. However, these traditional features, originally not created for music recommendation, cannot capture all relevant information in the audio and thus put a cap on recommendation performance. Using a novel model based on deep belief network and probabilistic graphical model, we unify the two stages into an automated process that simultaneously learns features from audio content and makes personalized recommendations. Compared with existing deep learning based models, our model outperforms them in both the warm-start and cold-start stages without relying on collaborative filtering (CF). We then present an efficient hybrid method to seamlessly integrate the automatically learnt features and CF. Our hybrid method not only significantly improves the performance of CF but also outperforms the traditional feature mbased hybrid method.