Hit Song Prediction based on Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

Record companies invest billions of dollars in new talent around the globe each year. Gaining insight into what actually makes a hit song would provide tremendous benefits for the music industry. In this research, we tackle this question by focusing on predicting rank of hit songs in the next 6 months. Our dataset is used in ZALO AI CHALLENGE 2019 in Hit Song Prediction problem including not only songs but also its information such as composer, artist name, released date, etc. Because of that, while most previous work formulates hit song prediction as a regression or classification problem, we present in this paper how to apply Gradient Boosting technique to treat it as a ranking problem. The resulting best model has a good performance when predicting whether a song is a top 10 dance hit versus a lower listed position with 1.48815 Root Mean Square Error - our result dominates most of the solution in this competition (better than 3rd ranked solution of 87 in total). Moreover, it is possible to further improve by extracting chords, tones and more information from each song to obtain the highlights of songs and by using linguistics model to offer high-level features of metadata.