A Deep Collaborative Neural Generative Embedding for Rating Prediction in Movie Recommendation Systems

The exponential growth of over-the-top (OTT) entertainment has fueled a surge in content consumption across diverse formats, especially in regional Indian languages. With the Indian film industry producing over 1500 films annually in more than 20 languages, personalized recommendations are essential to highlight relevant content. To overcome the limitations of traditional recommender systems—such as static latent vectors, poor handling of cold-start scenarios, and the absence of uncertainty modeling—we propose a deep Collaborative Neural Generative Embedding (C-NGE) model. C-NGE dynamically learns user and item representations by integrating rating information and metadata features in a unified neural framework. It uses metadata as sampled noise and applies the reparameterization trick to capture latent patterns better and support predictions for new users or items without retraining. We evaluate C-NGE on the Indian Regional Movies (IRM) dataset, along with MovieLens 100 K and 1 M. Results show that our model consistently outperforms several existing methods, and its extensibility allows for incorporating additional signals like user reviews and multimodal data to enhance recommendation quality.