Music Emotion Classification: A Regression Approach

Typical music emotion classification (MEC) approaches categorize emotions and apply pattern recognition methods to train a classifier. However, categorized emotions are too ambiguous for efficient music retrieval. In this paper, we model emotions as continuous variables composed of arousal and valence values (AV values), and formulate MEC as a regression problem. The multiple linear regression, support vector regression, and AdaBoost.RT are adopted to evaluate the prediction accuracy. Since the regression approach is inherently continuous, it is free of the ambiguity problem existing in its categorical counterparts.