Exploiting MUSIC model to solve cold-start user problem in content-based music recommender systems

The new user cold-start problem is a grand challenge in content-based music recommender systems. This happens when the systems do not have sufficient information regarding the user's preferences. Towards solving this problem, in this study, a rating prediction framework is proposed. The proposed framework allows the systems to predict the user's rating scores for unrated musical pieces, by which good recommendations can be generated. The core idea here is to leverage the so-called MUSIC model, i.e., a five-factor musical preference model, which is characterized by Mellow, Unpretentious, Sophisticated, Intense, and Contemporary as the user's musical preference profiles. When a user newly joins the systems, the first five-factor musical preference profile is established based on the user's age and brain type information which is extracted from questionnaires. When the user experiences the systems for a certain period, his/her rating scores for experienced musical pieces are utilized for generating the second five-factor musical preference profile. The recommendations are then provided based on the rating scores predicted from a non-linear combination of these two five-factor musical preference profiles. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the five-factor musical preference in alleviating the new user cold-start problem. In addition, the proposed method can potentially provide high-quality recommendations.