Google Prediction API for Finding a Musical Profile

Grooveshark works on several Analysis and Prediction tasks, such as Music recommendations (both long tail and popular music), People recommendations, and Artist analytics.

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How I Would Use the Google Prediction API ( To Find Your Musical Profile)

DataScientist Blog, by Chris Bates on May 22nd, 2010

This past week Google made a couple announcements that they would be offering BigQuery and Predication API's that would help people analyze massive datasets and predict outcomes. On the surface, this type of offering is quite intriguing to people who work in machine learning types of jobs.

At Grooveshark, we have a variety of problems that require Analysis and Prediction. For example, a few of the things we do include:

Music recommendations for both long tail and popular music. Pandora, of course, is already famous for their expert-style recommendations. What makes our problem so unique is that we have so much more content that needs to be recommended. It is rumored that Pandora only has 700,000 tracks. Our library runs in the millions.
People recommendations for users to follow others with similar tastes in music. Like Facebook, we have a social discovery feature. However instead of recommending people in your social graph, we analyze your listening behavior and offer you the opportunity to follow others who listen to similar styles of music.
Artist analytics for new and established artists ...
Advertising analytics. Advertising is our core revenue generator, and so it makes perfect sense that we use every tool at our disposal to make the user experience more enjoyable. What types of ads resonate well with our users given their music taste, location, and usage of the site?

Getting Technical: The Google Prediction API

Now that you know the types of problems the BigQuery and Prediction API might be good for, how do we go about using them? Well, unfortunately Google didn't provide many details at launch. In the forums, they refused to tell which algorithms they would be offering. Old tried and true? New state-of-the art? Proprietary or open? No clue. Upon signing up for an invitation to test though, I did gain a few insights.

They seem to be offering categorical classification and prediction services.

Let's dig in further.

Read more.