Tag-aware dynamic music recommendation

We present a tag-aware dynamic music recommendation framework that achieves personalized and accurate music recommendations to users. The proposed framework leverages the available semantic labels (in terms of tags) of music tracks to complement a highly sparse user-item interaction matrix, which effectively addresses the data sparsity issue faced by most music recommendation systems. Music tracks are more accurately represented by aggregating the latent factors derived from both the tag space and the user interaction information. The proposed framework further employs a Gaussian state-space model to capture the evolving nature of users' preferences over time, which helps achieve time-sensitive recommendation of music. A variational approximation is developed to achieve fast inference and learning of model parameters. Experiments conducted using actual music data and comparison with state-of-the-art competitive recommendation algorithms help demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.