7,579 research outputs found
The Music Streaming Sessions Dataset
At the core of many important machine learning problems faced by online
streaming services is a need to model how users interact with the content.
These problems can often be reduced to a combination of 1) sequentially
recommending items to the user, and 2) exploiting the user's interactions with
the items as feedback for the machine learning model. Unfortunately, there are
no public datasets currently available that enable researchers to explore this
topic. In order to spur that research, we release the Music Streaming Sessions
Dataset (MSSD), which consists of approximately 150 million listening sessions
and associated user actions. Furthermore, we provide audio features and
metadata for the approximately 3.7 million unique tracks referred to in the
logs. This is the largest collection of such track metadata currently available
to the public. This dataset enables research on important problems including
how to model user listening and interaction behaviour in streaming, as well as
Music Information Retrieval (MIR), and session-based sequential
recommendations.Comment: 3 pages, introducing a new large scale datase
Support the Underground: Characteristics of Beyond-Mainstream Music Listeners
Music recommender systems have become an integral part of music streaming
services such as Spotify and Last.fm to assist users navigating the extensive
music collections offered by them. However, while music listeners interested in
mainstream music are traditionally served well by music recommender systems,
users interested in music beyond the mainstream (i.e., non-popular music)
rarely receive relevant recommendations. In this paper, we study the
characteristics of beyond-mainstream music and music listeners and analyze to
what extent these characteristics impact the quality of music recommendations
provided. Therefore, we create a novel dataset consisting of Last.fm listening
histories of several thousand beyond-mainstream music listeners, which we
enrich with additional metadata describing music tracks and music listeners.
Our analysis of this dataset shows four subgroups within the group of
beyond-mainstream music listeners that differ not only with respect to their
preferred music but also with their demographic characteristics. Furthermore,
we evaluate the quality of music recommendations that these subgroups are
provided with four different recommendation algorithms where we find
significant differences between the groups. Specifically, our results show a
positive correlation between a subgroup's openness towards music listened to by
members of other subgroups and recommendation accuracy. We believe that our
findings provide valuable insights for developing improved user models and
recommendation approaches to better serve beyond-mainstream music listeners.Comment: Accepted for publication in EPJ Data Science - link to published
version will be adde
Large-Scale User Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks for Music Discovery on Multiple Time Scales
The amount of content on online music streaming platforms is immense, and
most users only access a tiny fraction of this content. Recommender systems are
the application of choice to open up the collection to these users.
Collaborative filtering has the disadvantage that it relies on explicit
ratings, which are often unavailable, and generally disregards the temporal
nature of music consumption. On the other hand, item co-occurrence algorithms,
such as the recently introduced word2vec-based recommenders, are typically left
without an effective user representation. In this paper, we present a new
approach to model users through recurrent neural networks by sequentially
processing consumed items, represented by any type of embeddings and other
context features. This way we obtain semantically rich user representations,
which capture a user's musical taste over time. Our experimental analysis on
large-scale user data shows that our model can be used to predict future songs
a user will likely listen to, both in the short and long term.Comment: Author pre-print version, 20 pages, 6 figures, 4 table
Taste or Addiction?: Using Play Logs to Infer Song Selection Motivation
Online music services are increasing in popularity. They enable us to analyze
people's music listening behavior based on play logs. Although it is known that
people listen to music based on topic (e.g., rock or jazz), we assume that when
a user is addicted to an artist, s/he chooses the artist's songs regardless of
topic. Based on this assumption, in this paper, we propose a probabilistic
model to analyze people's music listening behavior. Our main contributions are
three-fold. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study
modeling music listening behavior by taking into account the influence of
addiction to artists. Second, by using real-world datasets of play logs, we
showed the effectiveness of our proposed model. Third, we carried out
qualitative experiments and showed that taking addiction into account enables
us to analyze music listening behavior from a new viewpoint in terms of how
people listen to music according to the time of day, how an artist's songs are
listened to by people, etc. We also discuss the possibility of applying the
analysis results to applications such as artist similarity computation and song
recommendation.Comment: Accepted by The 21st Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining (PAKDD 2017
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