Should I Buy That CD?

1. Should I Buy That CD? A Neural Network Project By Lucas Divine

2. The Problem • If I pick a certain Music Album, I would like a neural net to tell me if it is worth buying or listening to. Motivation • To create a neural network that is comprehensible. A neural network that functions as closely as possible to how biological neural networks would.

3. The Neural Network • Designed as a feed-forward, acyclic, multilayer perceptron with no back propagation of errors. • Hyperbolic tangent as the activation function to prevent any specific data from skewing the overall results.

4. 1 Price [1] Facts 2 [2] # Discs Opinion Buy Or Pass 3 # Songs [3] Stats User’s Gut Feeling 12 [12] Data Preprocessing Hidden Layer Output Layer Input Layer Diagram of the Network

5. Data and Example Layout

6. Gut Feeling Input • An input that affects how a majority of people decide on CDs • Affect the network results as it should • Allows for user interaction in the network

7. Weights • Most crucial step in the process • Static weights to affect all CDs the same way, thus judging fairly across the board • Made sure that all data had a scaled effect on the outcome depending on relevance

8. Sample Results

9. These Results • Vary quite a bit (so does the data) • Are specifically affected by varying stats • Show that the ANN does tell you to BUY good CDs and SORRY for bad ones • A ‘linear’ pattern does not occur, thus demonstrating the non-linear element of the perceptron network • User ‘gut feeling’ input has the effect that it should

10. Thank you! • Please refer to the project report (musicNN.pdf) for a deeper understanding • Also run musicNeuralNetwork.m in matlab to test it out yourself