Marketing Seminar (2019-08)

Topic: Dynamics of Musical Success: A Bayesian Nonparametric Approach

Speaker: Asim Ansari,Professor,Columbia University

Time: Wednesday, 18 Sept, 13:30-15:00

Location: Room K01, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

We model the dynamics of musical success over the last half century with a view towards constructing musically well-balanced playlists. We develop a novel non-parametric Bayesian model that combines data of different modalities (e.g. metadata, acoustic and textual data) to infer the correlates of album success. We estimate our model on a unique dataset which we collected using different online sources. Our model integrates different types of non-parametrics. It uses a supervised hierarchical Dirichlet process to represent crowd-sourced textual tags and dynamic penalized splines to capture the dynamics in acoustic features. Our results illuminate the patterns in the rise and decline of musical genres and the emergence of new forms of music. They also show how various acoustic measures have waxed and waned in importance over the years. We uncover a number of themes that categorize albums along sub-genres, contexts, emotions, and other aspects of the musical experience. We then show how our model can be used to compile new albums and playlists that appeal to different generations of listeners.

Introduction:

Professor Ansari's research addresses customer relationship management, e-commerce personalization and targeting, social network modeling, and Bayesian models of consumer actions. He is currently working on the use of machine learning methods for Big-Data settings in marketing. Prior to joining Columbia, Professor Ansari was at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has several publications in leading journals in marketing and allied fields. His research has appeared in theJournal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics,andPsychometrika.Professor Ansari is the recipient of the Paul Green Award from the American Marketing Association (1994) for his work on ecustomization. His research has also been nominated for the O'Dell Award (2005, 2007 and 2012), Paul Green Award (2003 and 2008), the Long-Term Impact Award from the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (2009), Frank M. Bass Outstanding Dissertation Award, (2014, 2015) and the John D. Little Award (2014). Ansari serves on the editorial board ofMarketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research.Professor Ansari has taught the core marketing course for several years. He currently teaches an elective course on Pricing Strategies for MBA and EMBA students and PhD courses on empirical modeling and Bayesian methods. He is the recipient of the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in the Core (2009).

Your participation is warmly welcomed!