Analysis of the Indonesian Tourist Destination Recommendation System Using User Profile-Based Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

Tourism recommendation systems in Indonesia are challenged by highly heterogeneous user preferences and severe rating sparsity, which undermine the effectiveness of conventional collaborative filtering methods. However, prior studies predominantly rely on rating-based interactions and often utilize generic datasets, limiting their ability to capture the contextual and behavioural diversity of Indonesian tourism. Although user profile information is known to influence preferences, its integration with latent factor models is still fragmented and rarely evaluated in a unified, context-aware framework. Consequently, existing approaches often produce suboptimal accuracy and lack robustness in sparse and imbalanced data environments. This study proposes a unified user profile-enriched collaborative filtering framework that integrates Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Jaccard similarity, and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) to jointly model latent preferences and contextual user characteristics. This integration constitutes the main novelty of this work, enabling simultaneous mitigation of sparsity and enhancement of personalization in a single pipeline. Experiments are conducted on an Indonesian tourism dataset, with performance evaluated using Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and execution time. The results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the rating-based baseline, achieving lower MAE (1.6994 vs. 1.7355) and RMSE (2.0653 vs. 2.1148), while maintaining comparable computational efficiency. Furthermore, the model demonstrates greater stability across varying neighbor sizes, indicating improved scalability and robustness. Practically, this approach provides a scalable and context-aware recommendation framework that can support more adaptive and personalized tourism services in Indonesia, particularly in real-world scenarios characterized by sparse and heterogeneous data.