Music Recommendation Based on Information of User Profiles, Music Genres and User Ratings

Music data has been becoming bigger and bigger in recent years. It makes online music stores hard to provide the users with good personalized services. Therefore, a number of past studies were proposed for effectively retrieving the user preferences on music. However, they countered problems such as new user, new item and rating sparsity. To cope with these problems, in this paper, we propose a creative method that integrates information of user profiles, music genres and user ratings. In terms of solving problem of new user, the user similarities can be calculated by the profiles instead of ratings. By the user similarities, the unknown ratings can be predicted using user-based Collaborative Filtering. In terms of solving problem of rating sparsity, the unknown ratings are initialized by ratings of music genres. Even facing new music items, the rating data will not be sparse due to imputing the initialized ratings. Because the rating data is enriched, the user preference can be retrieved by item-based Collaborative Filtering. The experimental results reveal that, our proposed method performs more promising than the compared methods in terms of Root Mean Squared Error.