Reciprocal Recommendation System for Online Dating

Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for potential romantic partners. Different from traditional user-item recommendations where the goal is to match items (e.g., books, videos, etc) with a user's interests, a recommendation system for online dating aims to match people who are mutually interested in and likely to communicate with each other. We introduce similarity measures that capture the unique features and characteristics of the online dating network, for example, the interest similarity between two users if they send messages to same users, and attractiveness similarity if they receive messages from same users. A reciprocal score that measures the compatibility between a user and each potential dating candidate is computed and the recommendation list is generated to include users with top scores. The performance of our proposed recommendation system is evaluated on a real-world dataset from a major online dating site in China. The results show that our recommendation algorithms significantly outperform previously proposed approaches, and the collaborative filtering-based algorithms achieve much better performance than content-based algorithms in both precision and recall. Our results also reveal interesting behavioral difference between male and female users when it comes to looking for potential dates. In particular, males tend to be focused on their own interest and oblivious towards their attractiveness to potential dates, while females are more conscientious to their own attractiveness to the other side of the line

Online Reciprocal Recommendation with Theoretical Performance Guarantees

A reciprocal recommendation problem is one where the goal of learning is not just to predict a user's preference towards a passive item (e.g., a book), but to recommend the targeted user on one side another user from the other side such that a mutual interest between the two exists. The problem thus is sharply different from the more traditional items-to-users recommendation, since a good match requires meeting the preferences of both users. We initiate a rigorous theoretical investigation of the reciprocal recommendation task in a specific framework of sequential learning. We point out general limitations, formulate reasonable assumptions enabling effective learning and, under these assumptions, we design and analyze a computationally efficient algorithm that uncovers mutual likes at a pace comparable to those achieved by a clearvoyant algorithm knowing all user preferences in advance. Finally, we validate our algorithm against synthetic and real-world datasets, showing improved empirical performance over simple baselines

Recommender Systems for Online Dating

Users of large online dating sites are confronted with vast numbers of candidates to browse through and communicate with. To help them in their endeavor and to cope with information overload, recommender systems can be utilized. This thesis introduces reciprocal recommender systems that are aimed towards the domain of online dating. An overview of previously developed methods is presented, and five methods are described in detail, one of which is a novel method developed in this thesis. The five methods are evaluated and compared on a historical data set collected from an online dating website operating in Finland. Additionally, factors influencing the design of online dating recommenders are described, and support for these characteristics are derived from our historical data set and previous research on other data sets. The empirical comparison of the five methods on different recommendation quality criteria shows that no method is overwhelmingly better than the others and that a trade-off need be taken when choosing one for a live system. However, making that trade-off decision is something that warrants future research, as it is not clear how different criteria affect user experience and likelihood of finding a partner in a live online dating context

Predicting interval time for reciprocal link creation using survival analysis

The majority of directed social networks, such as Twitter, Flickr and Google+, exhibit reciprocal altruism, a social psychology phenomenon, which drives a vertex to create a reciprocal link with another vertex which has created a directed link toward the former. In existing works, scientists have already predicted the possibility of the creation of reciprocal link—a task known as “reciprocal link prediction”. However, an equally important problem is determining the interval time between the creation of the first link (also called parasocial link) and its corresponding reciprocal link. No existing works have considered solving this problem, which is the focus of this paper. Predicting the reciprocal link interval time is a challenging problem for two reasons: First, there is a lack of effective features, since well-known link prediction features are designed for undirected networks and for the binary classification task; hence, they do not work well for the interval time prediction; Second, the presence of ever-waiting links (i.e., parasocial links for which a reciprocal link is not formed within the observation period) makes the traditional supervised regression methods unsuitable for such data. In this paper, we propose a solution for the reciprocal link interval time prediction task. We map this problem to a survival analysis task and show through extensive experiments on real-world datasets that survival analysis methods perform better than traditional regression, neural network-based models and support vector regression for solving reciprocal interval time prediction

Peer recommendation based on comments write on social networks

Social networks and virtual communities has become a popular communication tool among Internet users. Millions of users share publications about different aspects: educational, personal, cultural, etc. Therefore these social sites are rich sources of information about who can help us solve any problems. In this paper, we focus on using the written comments to recommend a person who can answer a request. An automatic analysis of information using text mining techniques was proposed to select the most suitable users. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed techniques are efficient and perform better than a standard search.Eje: XV Workshop de Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras de Informática (RedUNCI

Peer recommendation based on comments write on social networks

Social networks and virtual communities has become a popular communication tool among Internet users. Millions of users share publications about different aspects: educational, personal, cultural, etc. Therefore these social sites are rich sources of information about who can help us solve any problems. In this paper, we focus on using the written comments to recommend a person who can answer a request. An automatic analysis of information using text mining techniques was proposed to select the most suitable users. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed techniques are efficient and perform better than a standard search.Eje: XV Workshop de Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras de Informática (RedUNCI