Music recommendation by unified hypergraph

Abstract

Acoustic-based music recommender systems have received increasing interest in recent years. Due to the semantic gap between low level acoustic features and high level music concepts, many researchers have explored collaborative filtering techniques in music recommender systems. Traditional collaborative filtering music recommendation methods only focus on user rating information. However, there are various kinds of social media information, including different types of objects and relations among these objects, in music social communities such as Last.fm and Pandora. This information is valuable for music recommendation. However, there are two challenges to exploit this rich social media information: (a) There are many different types of objects and relations in music social communities, which makes it difficult to develop a unified framework taking into account all objects and relations. (b) In these communities, some relations are much more sophisticated than pairwise relation, and thus cannot be simply modeled by a graph. In this paper, we propose a novel music recommendation algorithm by using both multiple kinds of social media information and music acoustic-based content. Instead of graph, we use hypergraph to model the various objects and relations, and consider music recommendation as a ranking problem on this hypergraph. While an edge of an ordinary graph connects only two objects, a hyperedge represents a set of objects. In this way, hypergraph can be naturally used to model high-order relations. Experiments on a data set collected from the music social community Last.fm have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.