Feature Selection in Automatic Music Genre Classification

This paper presents the results of the application of a feature selection procedure to an automatic music genre classification system. The classification system is based on the use of multiple feature vectors and an ensemble approach, according to time and space decomposition strategies. Feature vectors are extracted from music segments from the beginning, middle and end of the original music signal (time decomposition). Despite being music genre classification a multi-class problem, we accomplish the task using a combination of binary classifiers, whose results are merged in order to produce the final music genre label (space decomposition). As individual classifiers several machine learning algorithms were employed: naive-Bayes, decision trees, support vector machines and multi-layer perceptron neural nets. Experiments were carried out on a novel dataset called Latin music database, which contains 3,227 music pieces categorized in 10 musical genres. The experimental results show that the employed features have different importance according to the part of the music signal from where the feature vectors were extracted. Furthermore, the ensemble approach provides better results than the individual segments in most cases.