A Novel Emotion-Aware Hybrid Music Recommendation Method Using Deep Neural Network

Abstract

Emotion-aware music recommendations has gained increasing attention in recent years, as music comes with the ability to regulate human emotions. Exploiting emotional information has the potential to improve recommendation performances. However, conventional studies identified emotion as discrete representations, and could not predict users’ emotional states at time points when no user activity data exists, let alone the awareness of the influences posed by social events. In this study, we proposed an emotion-aware music recommendation method using deep neural networks (emoMR). We modeled a representation of music emotion using low-level audio features and music metadata, model the users’ emotion states using an artificial emotion generation model with endogenous factors exogenous factors capable of expressing the influences posed by events on emotions. The two models were trained using a designed deep neural network architecture (emoDNN) to predict the music emotions for the music and the music emotion preferences for the users in a continuous form. Based on the models, we proposed a hybrid approach of combining content-based and collaborative filtering for generating emotion-aware music recommendations. Experiment results show that emoMR performs better in the metrics of Precision, Recall, F1, and HitRate than the other baseline algorithms. We also tested the performance of emoMR on two major events (the death of Yuan Longping and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in Zhejiang). Results show that emoMR takes advantage of event information and outperforms other baseline algorithms.