Optimization of Content Recommendation System Based on User Preferences Using Neural Collaborative Filtering

Recommender systems play a crucial role in enhancing user experience across various digital platforms by delivering relevant and personalized content. However, many recommender systems still face challenges in providing accurate recommendations, especially in cold-start situations and when user data is limited. This study aims to address these issues by optimizing content recommendation systems using Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF), a deep learning-based approach capable of capturing non-linear relationships between users and items. We compare the performance of NCF with traditional methods such as Matrix Factorization (MF) and Content-Based Filtering (CBF) using the MovieLens-1M dataset. The research method employed is a quantitative approach that encompasses several stages, including preprocessing, model training, and evaluation using metrics such as Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Precision@K. The results of this research are significant, demonstrating that NCF achieves the lowest RMSE of 0.870, outperforming MF with an RMSE of 0.950 and CBF with an RMSE of 1.020. Additionally, the Precision@K achieved by NCF is 0.73, indicating the model’s superior ability to provide more relevant recommendations compared to baseline methods. Hyperparameter tuning reveals that the optimal combination includes an embedding size of 16, three hidden layers, and a learning rate of 0.005. Despite its excellent performance, NCF still faces challenges in handling cold-start cases and requires significant computational resources. To address these challenges, integrating additional metadata and exploring regularization techniques such as dropout are recommended to enhance generalization. The implications of the findings from this study suggest that NCF can significantly improve prediction accuracy and recommendation relevance, thus having the potential for widespread application across various domains, such as e-commerce, streaming services, and education, to enhance user experience and the efficiency of recommendation systems. Further research is needed to explore innovative solutions to address cold-start challenges and reduce computational demands.