Do You Have a Pop Face? Here is a Pop Song. Using Profile Pictures to Mitigate the Cold-start Problem in Music Recommender Syste

When a new user registers to a recommender system service, the system does not know her taste and cannot propose meaningful suggestions (cold-start problem). This preliminary work attempts to mitigate the cold-start problem using the profile picture of the user as a sole information, following the intuition that a correspondence may exist between the pictures that people use to represent themselves and their taste. We proved that, at least in the small music community we used for our experiments, our method can improve the precision of both a classifier and a Top-N music recommender system in a cold-start condition. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval] Keywords Top-N recommendations, cold-start, evaluation, pictures.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: RECSYS
• Authors: Eugenio Tacchini, Ramon Morros, Verónica Vilaplana, Enrique Sañoso
• Keywords: Control Systems, RECSYS 2015