
Music Recommendations in Hyperbolic Space - brettds
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12378
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boltzmannbrain
Authors learn embeddings in a Poincaré space rather than Euclidean, better for
hierarchical relationships. The reference paper is a good read: Nickel & Kiela
'17 "Poincaré Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations",
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08039](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08039)

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darkmighty
The use of hyperbolic space to encode hierarchies is absolutely genius (in not
small part because it should be obvious), given the properties of hyperbolic
space to "expand" around fixed points exponentially, exactly like trees do* .
It seems like a continuous generalization of trees essentially. Beautiful.

*: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_space)

"Another distinctive property is the amount of space covered by the n-ball in
hyperbolic n-space: it increases exponentially with respect to the radius of
the ball for large radii, rather than polynomially. (...)"

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zenorogue
Genius because it should be obvious? Yes, it should be obvious for people
familiar with both areas, and it is actually known for quite a long time.
Hyperbolic geometry is used for visualizing hierarchical data since Lamping-
Rao 1995 and Munzner 1998, then there were papers about hyperbolic SOMs (2001
IIRC) and lots of papers about the Hyperbolic Random Graph model for scale-
free networks. I would say that the paper linked above introducing "Poincare
embeddings" (a rather poor name IMO, BTW) does not feel as impressive if you
know the details and the earlier work.

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zenorogue
We did some research a few years ago which was similar in some aspects. We
have mapped roguelikes and boardgames into the hyperbolic plane based on the
frequency of two games being mentioned together on Reddit. Here are our maps:

Roguelikes description:
[http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/reddit.php](http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/reddit.php)

Roguelikes interactive: [http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/rogueviz-
online.php?c=-la...](http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/rogueviz-
online.php?c=-lab+-dftcolor+383838FF+-canvas+101010+-sag+1+-color+2+-gload+3+-noplayer+--msg0&1=rv%2Froguelikes%2Fedges.csv&2=rv%2Froguelikes%2Fcolor.csv&3=rv%2Froguelikes%2Fcoord-67.txt)

Boardgames description:
[http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/redditboard.php](http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/redditboard.php)

Boardgames interactive: [http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/rogueviz-
online.php?c=-la...](http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/rogueviz-
online.php?c=-lab+-canvas+101010+-sag+1+-color+2+-gload+3+-noplayer+--msg0&1=rv%2Fboardgames%2Fedges.csv&2=rv%2Fboardgames%2Fcolor.csv&3=rv%2Fboardgames%2Fcoord-67.txt)

Since similar games are mapped together, and popular games tend to be close to
the center, our maps work great as a recommendation system too. They also look
great :)

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heyplanet
Of all the music recommendation systems out there, this one is my favorite:

[http://www.gnoosic.com](http://www.gnoosic.com)

It has an uber simple interface (you don't even need to log in) but no other
system gets me as well as this one.

What surprises me in the given article is the graph on the last page. Why was
the treatment group still listening more weeks after they already were getting
the old recommendations again?

I wish the graph would reach out further into the past then just one week
before the test. So one could get a feel for how much of the variance in the
graph is random.

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ep103
This is literally the only recommendation engine I've ever had any success
with. IIRC it was written by someone on HN

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jacobobryant
I'm working on a music recommender right now, I'd love your input:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20584508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20584508)
Mainly my work has focused on re-recommending songs you already know, e.g. in
an internet radio kind of setting. I'm thinking of incorporating something
like gnoosic for recommending new artists.

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vstuart
[https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckm44u/190...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckm44u/190712378_music_recommendations_in_hyperbolic/)

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b_tterc_p
An interesting idea. What else might this be applicable to? Social networks?

~~~
zenorogue
Hyperbolic geometry is used in the modelling of social networks and other
scale-free networks, see the Hyperbolic Random Graph model.

