Music Recommendations in Hyperbolic Space: An Application of Empirical Bayes and Hierarchical Poincaré Embeddings

Matrix Factorization (MF) is a common method for generating recommendations, where the proximity of entities like users or items in the embedded space indicates their similarity to one another. Though almost all applications implicitly use a Euclidean embedding space to represent two entity types, recent work has suggested that a hyperbolic Poincaré ball may be more well suited to representing multiple entity types, and in particular, hierarchies. We describe a novel method to embed a hierarchy of related music entities in hyperbolic space. We also describe how a parametric empirical Bayes approach can be used to estimate link reliability between entities in the hierarchy. Applying these methods together to build personalized playlists for users in a digital music service yielded a large and statistically significant increase in performance during an A/B test, as compared to the Euclidean model.