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In recent years, the ever-growing contents (movies, clothes, books, etc.) accessible and buyable via the Internet have led to the information overload issue and therefore the item targeting problem. Indeed, the huge mass of contents complexifies the identification of items fitting users' expectations. As powerful filtering tools, recommender systems efficiently alleviate the item targeting issue. Collaborative filtering-based methods are among the most influential algorithms adopted in recommender systems. Among collaborative filtering-based methods, model-based approaches are widely used in recent powerful recommendation methods. Due to its efficiency, the matrix factorization technique is spreadly employed in model-based approaches. However, those methods badly deal with issues such as data sparseness and cold-start problems that severely affect the recommendation quality. To overcome these limitations shown by state-of-the-art methods, we propose in this paper a recommender approach that couples the effectiveness of an enhanced matrix factorization technique to the power of a deep neural network model. In the first step, the user's latent factors and item latent factors are extracted from a doubly-regularized matrix factorization process. Thereafter, those latent factors are used to feed a deep learning structure in a forward-propagation process, and a normalized cross-entropy method is used to increase the precision of the deep neural network through a backpropagation process. The end prediction is made by combining results from the matrix factorization step and the deep neural structure. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world datasets and show that our proposal outperforms other methods in terms of prediction accuracy and recommendation quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]