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

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.