Home Tips & Tricks Dating sites and matchmaking apps are one of the most interesting and, at the same time, absolutely typical applications of modern machine learning algorithms. Let’s discuss the main tasks and principles of dating systems from the point of view of Data Science, as well as original examples of matching rules that are used for those in the hope of finding love on the other side of the screen. Today, it is not necessary to manually look through the profile of each user on Ladadate that may be of interest to you. By analogy with recommender systems in online stores and online cinemas, dating platforms themselves perform the initial selection of candidates, forming a list of potential partners. At the same time, not only simple filters work, such as: choosing the desired gender, orientation, age, geolocation, and other formal criteria. Most dating services analyze user pictures, showing you people with the type of appearance that you find most attractive. Moreover, the interests and preferences of users obtained from third-party services, such as playlists on Spotify or recent purchases on Amazon, are taken into account. And Tinder’s algorithms are generally based on your behavior on Facebook and Instagram, including: virtual friends, posts, likes, and pictures. This approach based on the analysis of real data is considered more relevant to the real nature of the user. So, the probability of offering them a suitable person will be higher. All these functions of automated selection of personal recommendations are impossible without machine learning methods. How matchmaking platforms work The work of dating services is not limited to the selection of the best candidates for each user. After the match, the dating platform continues to analyze the nature of communication between people who like each other, recognizing the tone and meaning of the content in text and audio messages. It also performs automatic image recognition. In particular, Badoo has a function to detect images of an intimate nature in pictures to warn the user about this. What machine learning algorithms work in dating Having considered the typical capabilities of dating applications, we can list the main tasks of ML algorithms that are used in the implementation of these functions: classification;clustering;forecasting;pattern recognition;information retrieval and text analysis. Together, all these tasks come down to collaborative filtering — predicting user preferences based on the history of their previous events and the interests of similar people. At the same time, elements of classification, clustering, and filling in missing data are combined. Of the specific ML algorithms, neural networks are actively used here, including working on deep learning algorithms. For instance, Badoo can search for users with a certain appearance by specifying a picture of the desired partner who looks like a famous athlete, actor, or another famous figure. The algorithm finds a face in the photo, determines its features and characteristics, compares it with the data of its database (there are more than 530 million people in Badoo), and issues similar candidates.
