Wondering if significant other is a match made in heaven? Well, that may or may not be not be the case, but you will for sure know if your match is made on Facebook. Researchers have come up with a way to figure out if you will be breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend in the next sixty days. The New York Times has reported about a new research paper written by Jon Klienberg, a Computer Scientist at Cornell University and Lars Backstrom, a Senior Engineer at Facebook. The paper said that using a method called dispersion rather than embeddedness, the researchers were able to accurately identify who you’re dating and whether you are in the danger of breaking up.
The study can help see if you're going to break up in the next 60 days (Image credit: Getty Images)
The algorithm they designed was based around dispersion. The metric looks at connections between people who have a different set of friends. The researchers found that the total number of mutual friends between two people was not exactly a great indicator of romantic relationships. Instead, they put dispersion to test wherein not just mutual friends, but also people from completely another part of a person’s network neighbourhood were measured. High dispersion occurred when the couple’s mutual friends were not well connected to each other.For example, a spouse or a significant other is more likely to introduce the person he’s married to or dating to his colleagues, friends from college or even the group he hangs out with on weekends. The person being introduced may not have any other common connections with these set of friends belonging to the person she’s dating.Check this diagram out. Here, you’re at the centre of things. On the lower left of the screen is your significant other or spouse. The clusters are your colleagues and friends. Now, you’ll se that the blue dot your girlfriend or boyfriend is, feels away from these two major clusters, yet has links to many of them. This makes it easier for the researchers to figure out who’s dating whom.
You and your significant other... on Facebook
However, the problem is that if the formula ends up guessing incorrectly, there’s a high possibility that the couple may break up soon. “We find that relationships on which recursive dispersion fails to correctly identify the partner are significantly more likely to transition to ‘single’ status over a 60- day period. This effect holds across all relationship ages and is particularly pronounced for relationships up to 12 months in age; here the transition probability is roughly 50 percent greater when recursive dispersion fails to recognize the partner,” the duo said. Using this algorithm, they were also able to correctly identify who’s dating whom with 60 percent accuracy, far better than the 2 percent that they’d get from mere guessing. The research was conducted using data from randomly selected 1.3 million Facebook users who were above the age of 20 years and had 50 to 2,000 friends. They, of course, needed to have a relationship status with a spouse listed on it. The method is not fool-proof. Besides the shortcomings of the algorithm itself, it assumes that you, your spouse and all your friends are active on Facebook and that you haven’t listed any of your friends as a partner, as a joke.Would you find it cool to have your relationship status predicted by a formula on Facebook?
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