A predictive model of music preference using pairwise comparisons

Abstract

Music recommendation is an important aspect of many streaming services and multi-media systems, however, it is typically based on so-called collaborative filtering methods. In this paper we consider the recommendation task from a personal viewpoint and examine to which degree music preference can be elicited and predicted using simple and robust queries such as pairwise comparisons. We propose to model - and in turn predict - the pairwise music preference using a very flexible model based on Gaussian Process priors for which we describe the required inference. We further propose a specific covariance function and evaluate the predictive performance on a novel dataset. In a recommendation style setting we obtain a leave-one-out accuracy of 74% compared to 50% with random predictions, showing potential for further refinement and evaluation.