Research article

Herd or heard? Disentangling social influence and personal taste in music listening with a probabilistic topic model

Hongyi Zha, Jiapeng Liu, Miłosz Kadziński, Jinnan Huang, Xiuwu Liao

Omega Version of Record Available online Article 103612

A probabilistic topic model that separates personal taste from herd effects in large-scale music listening, using spike-slab assignment and scalable variational inference to expose interpretable herding scores, interest mixtures, and item popularity.

10.1016/j.omega.2026.103612