Recommendation of Music Based on DASS-21 (Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scales) Using Fuzzy Clustering

The present study proposes a music recommendation service in a mobile environment using the DASS-21 questionnaire to distinguish and measure certain psychological state instability symptoms—viz. anxiety, depression, and stress—that anyone can experience regardless of job or age. In general, the outcome of the DASS-21 from almost every participant did not reveal any single psychological state out of the abovementioned three states. Therefore, the weighted scores were calculated for each scale and fuzzy clustering was used to cluster users into groups with similar states. For the initial dataset’s generation, we used the DASS inventory collected from the Open-Source Psychometrics Project conducted from 2017 to 2019 on approximately 39,000 respondents, and the results of the survey showed that the average scores for each scale were 23.6 points for depression, 17.4 for anxiety, and 23.3 for stress. Based on the datasets collected from fuzzy clustering, the individuals were classified into three groups: Group 1 was recommended with music for “high” depression, “high” anxiety, and “low” stress; Group 2 was recommended with music for “normal” depression, “low” anxiety, and “normal” stress; and Group 3 was recommended with music for “high” depression, “high” anxiety, and “high” stress. Especially, the largest numbers of recommended music in the three groups were for Group 1 with “High” depressive (4.64), Group 2 for “Low” anxiety (4.54), and Group 3 for “High” anxiety (4.76). In addition, to compare the results of fuzzy clustering with other data, the silhouette coefficient of the samples extracted with the same severity ratio and those generated by simple random sampling were 0.641 and 0.586, respectively, which were greater than 0. The proposed service can recommend not only the music of users with similar trends at all psychological states, but also the music of users with similar psychological states in part.