Neuro-genetic programming for multigenre classification of music content

Abstract A machine learning approach based on hybridization of genetic programming and neural networks is used to derive mathematical models for music genre classification. We design three multi-label classifiers with different trade-offs between complexity and accuracy, which are able to identify the degree of belonging of music content to ten different music genres. Our approach is innovative as it entirely relies on simple analytical functions and a reduced number of features. Resulting classifiers have an extremely low computational complexity and are suitable to be easily integrated in low-cost embedded systems for real-time applications. The GTZAN data set is used for model training and to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed classifiers. Despite of the reduced number of features used in our approach, the accuracy of our models is found to be similar to that of more complex music genre classification tools previously published in the literature.