Optimal radio channel recommendations with explicit and implicit feedback

Abstract

The very large majority of recommender systems are running as server-side applications, and they are controlled by the content provider, i.e., who provides the recommended items. This paper focuses on a different scenario: the user is supposed to be able to access content from multiple providers, in our application they offer radio channels, and it is up to a personal recommender installed on the clients' side to decide which channel to select and recommend to the user. We exploit the implicit feedback derived from the user's listening behavior, and we model channel recommendation as a sequential decision making problem. We have implemented a personal RS that integrates reinforcement learning techniques to decide what channel to play every time the user asks for a new music track or the current track finishes playing. In a live user study we show that the proposed system can sequentially select the next channel to play such that the users listen to the streamed tracks for a larger fraction, and for more time, compared to a baseline system not exploiting implicit feedback.