Harald Schweiger, Emilia Parada-Cabaleiro, Markus Schedl
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Music playlist creation is a crucial, yet not fully explored task in music data mining and music information retrieval. Previous studies have largely focused on investigating diversity, popularity, and serendipity of tracks in human- or machine-generated playlists. However, the concept of playlist coherence - vaguely defined as smooth transitions between tracks - remains poorly understood and even lacks a standardized definition. In this paper, we provide a formal definition for measuring playlist coherence based on the sequential ordering of tracks, offering a more interpretable measurement compared to existing literature, and allowing for comparisons between playlists with different musical styles. The presented formal framework to measure coherence is applied to analyze a substantial dataset of user-generated playlists, examining how various playlist characteristics influence coherence. We identified four key attributes: playlist length, number of edits, track popularity, and collaborative playlist curation as potential influencing factors. Using correlation and causal inference models, the impact of these attributes on coherence across ten auditory and one metadata feature are assessed. Our findings indicate that these attributes influence playlist coherence to varying extents. Longer playlists tend to exhibit higher coherence, whereas playlists dominated by popular tracks or those extensively modified by users show reduced coherence. In contrast, collaborative playlist curation yielded mixed results. The insights from this study have practical implications for enhancing recommendation tasks, such as automatic playlist generation and continuation, beyond traditional accuracy metrics. As a demonstration of these findings, we propose a simple greedy algorithm that reorganizes playlists to align coherence with observed trends.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00531-3.
期刊介绍：
EPJ Data Science covers a broad range of research areas and applications and particularly encourages contributions from techno-socio-economic systems, where it comprises those research lines that now regard the digital “tracks” of human beings as first-order objects for scientific investigation. Topics include, but are not limited to, human behavior, social interaction (including animal societies), economic and financial systems, management and business networks, socio-technical infrastructure, health and environmental systems, the science of science, as well as general risk and crisis scenario forecasting up to and including policy advice.
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