Factoring in What Gets Listened To

Evaluating the performance of a Factorisation Machine-based music recommender using musical features for child listeners

Bachelor Thesis (2024)
Author(s)

K.F. Barbers (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor(s)

Robin Ungruh – Mentor (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)

Maria S. Pera – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)

Julián Urbano – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
More Info
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Publication Year
2024
Language
English
Graduation Date
25-06-2024
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Project
['CSE3000 Research Project']
Programme
['Computer Science and Engineering']
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
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Abstract

Recommender systems play a large role on contemporary music platforms, but they tend to work less well for non-mainstream listeners such as children. Additionally, there is no one strategy to perfectly capture a listener's music preference. As children develop understanding of music in different stages, using features they respond to might make recommendations more accurate. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the effectiveness of a recommender which utilises matrix factorisation augmented with the musical features of tempo, mode, dynamics and time signature in recommending songs a child user would like. We evaluate the quality of this recommender based on the Factorisation Machine algorithm by comparing it to a non-augmented variant of the same algorithm and similar ones using fewer of the same features. Results show that while adding features improves the quality of recommendations, adding too many or the wrong features diminishes said improvement, although more research is needed in this direction.

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