Dating apps such as Grindr and Tinder are now people’s instant method of dating, avoiding the traditional method of one-on-one meetups to find the right match. Using these dating apps save time and money (it’s a date, of course there’s money going to be spent), and they give their users more choices, more potential partners they can match with. With that being said, one of the claims apps and websites have is their ability to use data to filter through profiles for better matches with their personality tests, so that the applications can suggest potential partners to match with their users. But is romantic desire really predictable? Can an algorithm actually predict a romantic match? BBC has the details:
The issue for scientists who might want to investigate their data, and journalists who want to fact-check their claims, is that the algorithms are the intellectual property of these companies, so they are not publicly available. Their entire business is based on developing smart match-making algorithms and keeping their formulas private.
Joel found that her algorithm could predict actor desire and partner desire, but not compatibility. Not even a little bit. It could only predict negative percentages of variance – which is like being accurate less than 0% of the time. This might sound like a bit of a head scratcher, but, Joel says that her algorithm would have been better off using mean results for every dater rather than offering a tailored response. “It was completely useless,” says Joel. “It really should have done better.”
“My take is that when two people actually meet they form a shared dynamic that is more than the sum of its parts and cannot be predicted a priori,” says Joel. “Their individual preferences do not make up the substance of what they find attractive. My rating of whether I found you funny after meeting you will predict whether I like you, but my desire for a funny person and your measure of whether you are funny do not because we might not agree on a sense of humour.”
Finding a way to make accurate predictions is not going to be straightforward.
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