Facebook can predict about your relationship or love life

A scientific paper authored by a computer scientist and a senior engineer at Facebook has shown how your online social networks not only reveal who you’re going out with, but also when you’ll break up (and yes, that's without checking your relationship status).

Researchers say close friends are likely to share a lot of friends in common, which social scientists call "embeddedness" . The study, conducted by Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg,  used anonymous data from more than 1.3 million Facebook users to analyse the shape of their friendship networks – looking at how many friends individuals had in common, who was friends with their friends, and so on and so forth.

They identified with 60%accuracy who was dating whom, much better than the 2% accuracy they'd get from random guessing, 'The Verge' reported. High dispersion also seems to be correlated with longer relationships, researchers said. Couples were 50% more likely to break up in the next two months if the dispersion algorithm failed to guess that they were dating, the study found.

Resaerchers also looked at metrics such as how many times a user viewed another person's profile, attendance at the same events, and messages sent. Dispersion turned out to be the most overall accurate metric for determining romantic relationships.

The study, which will be presented next year, studied a random sample of 103 million Facebook users who listed themselves as in a romantic relationship. according to Quartz. This gave Backstrom and Kleinberg billions of links and millions of nodes (points where links overlap) to work with.

Essentially, romantic partners act as social bridges between individuals’ networks, introducing people to each other and creating friendships. Eg, you might go for drinks with your boyfriend's friends from work and bring some of your friends from home to meet them.

Using this dispersion algorithm Backstrom and Kleinberg  were able to correctly identify who somebody’s spouse was 60 per cent of the time and correctly guess somebody’s partner a third of the time – a far better return than the 2 per cent success rate from pure guesswork.

This seems to make sense given that the dispersion between a couple’s friends is likely to decrease over time as social functions gradually introduce the pair’s social networks to one another.

However, the study also found that they could predict with some accuracy whether or not couples were likely to break up. Relationships that hadn’t been spotted using the dispersion algorithm were 50 per cent more likely to break up over the next two months (the time period examined by the study) compared to those that had been identified by looking at friendships of mutual friends.

This seems to suggest that long-lasting relationships tend to involve a lot of social interaction between individuals' networks - though this is by no means definitely causative.