Sequential modeling of Sessions using Recurrent Neural Networks for Skip Prediction

Abstract: Recommender systems play an essential role in music streaming services, prominently in the form of personalized playlists. Exploring the user interactions within these listening sessions can be beneficial to understanding the user preferences in the context of a single session. In the 'Spotify Sequential Skip Prediction Challenge', WSDM, and Spotify are challenging people to understand the way users sequentially interact with music. We describe our solution approach in this paper and also state proposals for further improvements to the model. The proposed model initially generates a fixed vector representation of the session, and this additional information is incorporated into an Encoder-Decoder style architecture. This method achieved the seventh position in the competition, with a mean average accuracy of 0.604 on the test set. The solution code is available at https://github.com/sainathadapa/spotify-sequential-skip-prediction.