Recovering Expert Critic-Sourced Network Adjacency between Musical Artists from Acoustic Distributions: A Construct-Validity Approach
Music recommendation relies primarily on two signals: user-item interactions, which fail in the cold-start regime, and intrinsic musical content, available for any recording. We argue that a third, largely untapped signal is both richer and more principled: critical adjacency, the pairwise relation established when an expert critic explicitly links two artists in long-form prose. It encodes deliberate judgments about which artists belong together. Prior work established its internal validity, showing it recovers coherent, interpretable communities and can match collaborative filtering in user-satisfaction simulations, with no user data. What has been missing is external validation: whethe...
| Authors | Elena Badillo-Goicoechea, Fengfeng He |
|---|---|
| Primary category | stat.ML |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 September 2026 |
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