Of Spiky Svds And Music Recommendation
Darius Afchar, Romain Hennequin, Vincent Guigue . Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2023 – 2 citations
[Paper]
The truncated singular value decomposition is a widely used methodology in music recommendation for direct similar-item retrieval or embedding musical items for downstream tasks. This paper investigates a curious effect that we show naturally occurring on many recommendation datasets: spiking formations in the embedding space. We first propose a metric to quantify this spiking organization’s strength, then mathematically prove its origin tied to underlying communities of items of varying internal popularity. With this new-found theoretical understanding, we finally open the topic with an industrial use case of estimating how music embeddings’ top-k similar items will change over time under the addition of data.