I’ve missed doing some pattern recognition programming this semester after doing so much last year, so I thought I would give it a go myself. The question I have posed (to myself, blogging in case anyone else is interested) – Is it possible to predict someone’s age based on the music they listen to? Or more accurately in this case have in their favourite playlist? I plan to find out!

The plan:

– Write Matlab code to extract release date of albums from a Spotify track URI which can easily be copied in bulk from a playlist. Done

– Collect a testing data set from the Spotify community. Main issue might be getting enough diversity of ages to submit data for me to use, but I will hopefully be able to bug my friends over in Spotify to lend a hand.

– Select a suitable classifier and train on the test data which will be based on the release years of albums people have on their playlists.

– See if my trained classifier can classy ages of unseen people’s data correctly and how accurately.

Will keep you updated!