HN user
Needlessly negative/critical, but I could not edit my post. Apologies, I really liked this effort. I dig stylometry, that's why I change my username so much.
Their future research may be really cool, tracing popular chord progressions all through pop history.
I could not find a paper (I was interested in how they constructed the dataset), but only an extended abstract of the talk [1]
It seems the dataset consisted of 70 songs. Since they don't specify the distribution, there is no saying if 80% accuracy is good or worse than average guessing.
An average of 35 samples per class is a serious few-shot constraint, which makes resorting to interpretable and simple Bayesian analysis a sane step. Note how the dataset is grossly underdefined too: 70 samples and 149 features, which can cause problems for more complex algo's.
I think we have to reconstruct this article from behind the pop-sci glasses this was presented with.
this is really serious stuff in terms of what was done
Sure, it is no joke paper, nor meandering about music theory without any hard proofs.
"The probability that McCartney wrote it was .018"
Probably this meant to say: The model predicts a 0.018 probability, but that is too careful for a pop-sci article. We can then question the validity of the model.
you'd better believe the math because it's much more reliable than people's recollections
"Ha-ha! People did a lot of drugs in the 60s!" nothing more...
And 10 years later, here we are talking about the discovery.
Also cute, in that it makes it sound like one of the authors spend 10 years working on this very basic analysis.
Meta: This article would have been published 10 years ago too (since the finding is interesting from a pop-sci view), but I doubt they would even dare describing the maths behind the publication. Now we are in techno-fetish era and write about the number of layers, GPU hours, BoW, and value networks, just to fool the reader into getting a glimpse of modern AI. While the methods in this article can be implemented in 1 hour of downloading Midi files and another hour of implementing Graham's 2002: A plan for spam. [2]
[1] https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/pressreleases/JSM2018-...