Enhancing Neural Collaborative Filtering for Product Recommendation by Integrating Sales Data and User Satisfaction

The rapid growth of e-commerce has made it increasingly difficult for users to select appropriate products due to the overwhelming amount of available information. Although many platforms, such as Amazon and Rakuten, encourage users to leave reviews, effectively utilizing this information for personalized recommendations remains a challenge. To address this issue, we propose a multi-task product recommender system that supports both new users without purchase histories and existing users with interaction records. For new users without purchase histories, we introduce a ranking-based method that combines three market-oriented features: sales volume, sales period, and user satisfaction. User satisfaction is quantified using sentiment analysis of product reviews. These three factors are integrated into a composite score to identify products with a strong market presence and positive customer feedback. For existing users, we developed an enhanced neural collaborative filtering (NCF) method that incorporates a product bias factor. This model, named bias neural collaborative filtering (BNCF), utilizes multilayer perceptrons to learn latent user–product interactions while also capturing item popularity bias. We evaluated the proposed approaches using a real-world dataset from Rakuten. The results show that our multi-task system effectively improves recommendation quality for users in both cold-start and data-rich scenarios.