Skip to content
0

Which songs are most suitable for a dancing party?

📖 Background

It's that vibrant time of year again - Summer has arrived (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere at least)! There's an energy in the air that inspires us to get up and move. In sync with this exuberance, your company has decided to host a dance party to celebrate. And you, with your unique blend of creativity and analytical expertise, have been entrusted with the crucial task of curating a dance-themed playlist that will set the perfect mood for this electrifying night. The question then arises - How can you identify the songs that would make the attendees dance their hearts out? This is where your coding skills come into play.

💾 The Data

You have assembled information on more than 125 genres of Spotify music tracks in a file called spotify.csv, with each genre containing approximately 1000 tracks. All tracks, from all time, have been taken into account without any time period limitations. However, the data collection was concluded in October 2022. Each row represents a track that has some audio features associated with it.

ColumnDescription
track_idThe Spotify ID number of the track.
artistsNames of the artists who performed the track, separated by a ; if there's more than one.
album_nameThe name of the album that includes the track.
track_nameThe name of the track.
popularityNumerical value ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest popularity. This is calculated based on the number of times the track has been played recently, with more recent plays contributing more to the score. Duplicate tracks are scored independently.
duration_msThe length of the track, measured in milliseconds.
explicitIndicates whether the track contains explicit lyrics. true means it does, false means it does not or it's unknown.
danceabilityA score ranges between 0.0 and 1.0 that represents the track's suitability for dancing. This is calculated by algorithm and is determined by factors like tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and regularity.
energyA score ranges between 0.0 and 1.0 indicating the track's intensity and activity level. Energetic tracks tend to be fast, loud, and noisy.
keyThe key the track is in. Integers map to pitches using standard Pitch class notation. E.g.0 = C, 1 = C♯/D♭, 2 = D, and so on. If no key was detected, the value is -1.
loudnessThe overall loudness, measured in decibels (dB).
modeThe modality of a track, represented as 1 for major and 0 for minor.
speechinessMeasures the amount of spoken words in a track. A value close to 1.0 denotes speech-based content, while 0.33 to 0.66 indicates a mix of speech and music like rap. Values below 0.33 are usually music and non-speech tracks.
acousticnessA confidence measure ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 representing the highest confidence that the track is acoustic.
instrumentalnessInstrumentalness estimates the likelihood of a track being instrumental. Non-lyrical sounds such as "ooh" and "aah" are considered instrumental, whereas rap or spoken word tracks are classified as "vocal". A value closer to 1.0 indicates a higher probability that the track lacks vocal content.
livenessA measure of the probability that the track was performed live. Scores above 0.8 indicate a high likelihood of the track being live.
valenceA score from 0.0 to 1.0 representing the track's positiveness. High scores suggest a more positive or happier track.
tempoThe track's estimated tempo, measured in beats per minute (BPM).
time_signatureAn estimate of the track's time signature (meter), which is a notational convention to specify how many beats are in each bar (or measure). The time signature ranges from 3 to 7 indicating time signatures of 3/4, to 7/4.
track_genreThe genre of the track.

Source (data has been modified)

💪 Challenge

Your task is to devise an analytically-backed, dance-themed playlist for the company's summer party. Your choices must be justified with a comprehensive report explaining your methodology and reasoning. Below are some suggestions on how you might want to start curating the playlist:

  • Use descriptive statistics and data visualization techniques to explore the audio features and understand their relationships.
  • Develop and apply a machine learning model that predicts a song's danceability.
  • Interpret the model outcomes and utilize your data-driven insights to curate your ultimate dance party playlist of the top 50 songs according to your model.

Executive Summary

For the company's summer party, the creation of a playlist that gets all our employees dancing and having fun was requested. To achieve this, the data was analyzed, some predictive models were created (Random Forest, XGBoost, Decision Tree, and Extra Tree).

Based on the results of these models and the analysis of the most important features, a Nearest Neighbors model was ultimately used to select the 50 songs that will liven up the party.

Libraries

# import libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
import seaborn as sns
import plotly.express as px

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split, cross_val_score, GridSearchCV
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor, ExtraTreesRegressor
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeRegressor
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error as MSE
from sklearn import metrics
import xgboost as xgb
from sklearn.neighbors import NearestNeighbors
from sklearn import preprocessing

Access the data

# read the data
spotify = pd.read_csv('data/spotify.csv')

# view the first 5 rows
spotify.head()
# view the last 5 rows
spotify.tail()
# how many rows and columns
print('The dataset has {:.0f} rows and {:.0f} columns.'.format(spotify.shape[0], spotify.shape[1]))
# view column dtypes
spotify.info()
# view summary statistics
spotify.describe().T

Cleaning Data