Advances in next-track music recommendation
Creators: name: Kamehkhosh, Iman
Publisher: name: Technische Universität Dortmund
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Music recommendation
subject: Playlist generation
subject: Recommender systems
subject: 004
subject: Empfehlungssystem
subject: Wiedergabeliste
subject: Streaming
subject: Song
subject: Internetradio
subject: Kollaborative Filterung
subject: Nächste-Nachbarn-Problem

description: Technological advances in the music industry have dramatically changed how people access and listen to music. Today, online music stores and streaming services offer easy and immediate means to buy or listen to a huge number of songs. One traditional way to find interesting items in such cases when a vast amount of choices are available is to ask others for recommendations. Music providers utilize correspondingly music recommender systems as a software solution to the problem of music overload to provide a better user experience for their customers. At the same time, an enhanced user experience can lead to higher customer retention and higher business value for music providers. Different types of music recommendations can be found on today's music platforms, such as Spotify or Deezer. Providing a list of currently trending music, finding similar tracks to the user's favorite ones, helping users discover new artists, or recommending curated playlists for a certain mood (e.g., romantic) or activity (e.g., driving) are examples of common music recommendation scenarios. "Next-track music recommendation" is a specific form of music recommendation that relies mainly on the user's recently played tracks to create a list of tracks to be played next. Next-track music recommendations are used, for instance, to support users during playlist creation or to provide personalized radio stations. A particular challenge in this context is that the recommended tracks should not only match the general taste of the listener but should also match the characteristics of the most recently played tracks. This thesis by publication focuses on the next-track music recommendation problem and explores some challenges and questions that have not been addressed in previous research. In the first part of this thesis, various next-track music recommendation algorithms as well as approaches to evaluate them from the research literature are reviewed. The recommendation techniques are categorized into the four groups of content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, co-occurrence-based, and sequence-aware algorithms. Moreover, a number of challenges, such as personalizing next-track music recommendations and generating recommendations that are coherent with the user's listening history are discussed. Furthermore, some common approaches in the literature to determine relevant quality criteria for next-track music recommendations and to evaluate the quality of such recommendations are presented. The second part of the thesis contains a selection of the author's publications on next- track music recommendation as follows. 1. The results of comprehensive analyses of the musical characteristics of manually created playlists for music recommendation; 2. the results of a multi-dimensional comparison of different academic and commercial next-track recommending techniques; 3. the results of a multi-faceted comparison of different session-based recommenders, among others, for the next-track music recommendation problem with respect to their accuracy, popularity bias, catalog coverage as well as computational complexity; 4. a two-phase approach to recommend accurate next-track recommendations that also match the characteristics of the most recent listening history; 5. a personalization approach based on multi-dimensional user models that are extracted from the users' long-term preferences; 6. a user study with the aim of determining the quality perception of next-track music recommendations generated by different algorithms.