Coffee Meets Bagel Meets Me – Statistical analysis of online dating

https://medium.com/@mydatablog/coffee-meets-bagel-meets-ginny-ea33fd0780ae

by ceph_ • 12 years ago

76 45 12 years ago

It's a cute read but there is really no data analysis. Her conclusion is "I still rather just look at profile pictures."

caractacus• 12 years ago

It's a cute read

That's all you needed.

thret• 12 years ago

"Also true story I generated this data and actually wrote a for-loop that would print out the top ten most highly-correlated words from 10 to 1 and pause in between each word to build suspense (for me alone at my computer)."

Adorable.

I am curious why she would use word length and exclamation/emoji/question mark ratios but not check for spelling or punctuation? Surely they are more indicative of someone's level of education and reading habits.

ginny23573• 12 years ago

Hey, I wrote the article. Thanks for reading it. This is only guys I went on dates with -- to be totally honest, I don't usually go out with people who make lots of spelling/grammar errors.

rybosome• 12 years ago

I once got a date because I sent a woman a message with the improper usage of "their" in place of "there", then followed up with a second message pointing out the mistake and my shame in having made it.

7Figures2Commas3• 12 years ago

In 2014, I went on 45 first dates with guys I met on Coffee Meets Bagel or Hinge (but mostly CMB). I started using Hinge around October 2014, and I added it to this analysis when I decided I needed more conversation data. This covers dates that happened between January 1st 2014 and December 30th 2014. I also went on a bunch of second dates, a handful of third dates, a smattering of fourth dates, and some past that.
The purpose of this analysis is to understand how to predict whether or not I’ll be compatible with someone based on his profile and the messages that he sends.

One of the best online dating studies was published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest[1].

Its basic conclusion: online dating is great because it expands one's access to potential partners but the algorithms don't really work and the profile-based structure creates an "assessment mindset" that leads individuals to be more picky, judgmental and non-committal. When there's a bunch of new potential matches available every day, you don't have to accept the fact that nobody is perfect. The nice guy or gal you had dinner with last night might pale in comparison to the Mr. or Ms. Perfect who could be in today's batch.

Ironically, the OP's experience demonstrates this dynamic more than it demonstrates merit to her own analysis. After 45 first dates, and what sounds like a reasonable number of second, third, fourth and n dates beyond that, the OP seems content to continue what she calls an "active dating life."

[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/PSPI-online_dating-p...

GuiA• 12 years ago

The end goal of dating isn't to find a life long partner for everyone. Some people date to that end - great. Some other people are fine dating "casually", without the prospect of a longterm (possibly lifelong) relationship as the goal. In other words, they might enjoy the company of the nice guy/gal from dinner last night for a few weeks, and then move on to a next person whenever they feel like it. That's also fine (although it might not be fine ~for you~).

Also the very concept of "dating" is very much tied to American culture, and one's perception of it (and its goals/effectiveness) will vary greatly depending on culture/religion/upbringing/etc. There's a version of you in a parallel universe brought up in a culture where arranged marriages are the norm, and you'd be posting in this thread about how ridiculous it is that one should date at all - your parents should pick your partner for you!

(I've been in a monogamous relationship for the past ~3 years)

7Figures2Commas3• 12 years ago

Your point is completely valid, however, the challenge is expectations/intentions. It's one thing if both parties are seeking the same thing; it's another if they aren't. I would venture a guess that many times there are misalignments. In some cases, these may be conscious (somebody is looking for casual dating on a marriage-oriented site) while in others, they're unconscious (individuals believe they're looking for a serious relationship when in reality they aren't ready for one).

Using the author of this post as an example, I wonder how well aligned her expectations and intentions were with those of her 45 first dates. Note that in one part of her post, the author refers to "meet[ing] someone" while in another part she refers to leading an "active dating life." Although you can obviously expect to meet multiple people before you meet someone with whom you want to start a monogamous relationship, these might be two different pursuits.

The questions around expectations/intentions are even more intriguing in light of the fact that the author says almost all of her dates looked like their photos and that she didn't have "any especially bad CMB/Hinge dates."

nothrabannosir2• 12 years ago

This is not immediately clear from your comment, yet worth point out:

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

People change, society changes, is it so surprising the dating scene would change with the advent of the internet? This is but a small step in the direction of Huxley's Brave New World, for example.

Perhaps that's what you meant, perhaps I was too eager to find negativity in an objective post. My apologies.

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

Amusingly, the best result I've ever gotten from online dating (from CMB, as a matter of fact) was when it gave me an excuse to ask a woman I'd known for over ten years out on a date. It turned out we'd both been interested in each other basically forever, but never thought the other would be interested :)

jplahn• 12 years ago

I would love to throw some sentiment analysis at this and see what could be conjured up. Maybe nothing because the sentiments would likely all be very similar and it would be hard to fine tune it enough, but it still might be an interesting exercise regardless.

carbocation• 12 years ago

I hope the variable names are self-explanatory. Any variable with a star next to it is statistically significant, which basically means it can be used to predict scores/ratings.

For a variety of reasons (e.g., multi-collinearity), following this procedure would potentially have you tossing the most important contributors to your model. I would use a different mechanism to evaluate the contributors to your model.

A more classical way to tell if something contributes to your model is by evaluating a model with that value compared with the model without it. How do the AIC (or BIC, or LR, or other metric that you like) of the N plausible models compare?

As an aside, the article's approach to evaluating the "significance" of predictors doesn't account for multiple testing. You have ~10 variables in your model, and your best P value is 0.01, which is essentially 0.1 after accounting for multiple testing (Bonferroni), which is not significant classically.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

Two additional notes:

1) R includes the F-test output that accounts for multiple variables in the regression: in this case, P = 0.089, which is a problem.

2) For variable/model selection, R's step() function is easy to use and tests using AIC too: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/ste...

hurin2• 12 years ago

I don't know what's more worrying, - the turn everything into data as an industry, or how happy individuals apparently are to apply it to themselves.

Take this with a grain of salt. The statistics of course (well on a larger scale than this article could take aren't wrong) but that an individual is ready primarily to evaluate their own choices in terms of them is rather scary.

girvo2• 12 years ago

Did you read her conclusion? It's not all that serious, just a cute bit of fun. Nothing wrong with that. Besides, everything is data already; regular boring introspection is just "data mining" with terrible sample sizes because of memory, and bad statistics because of biases. ;)

hurin2• 12 years ago

I wasn't specifically referring to her analysis, indeed as you point out with those sample sizes and the number of potential conflating factors it's unlikely this data is statistically worth anything -

I was commenting more on the general approach, of evaluating ones actions or choices within the context of a statistical framework.

dynofuz• 12 years ago

The model isnt that great. I'd kill some of those variables and run it again to find something more significant and with fewer confounding factors that drive down the explanatory power (R2)

jpeg_hero• 12 years ago

something profoundly depressing about the idea of 45 first dates in a year.

profoundly depressing for both the guy (the crap odds that come from being 1-out-of-45) and for the girl (can't be happy with any one from out of 45)

nothrabannosir2• 12 years ago

Hey man not at all, meeting people is great, it's fun. Dating is like life: people worry so much about what you achieve in the end that they forget to enjoy the ride.

Besides, it's the communication age, isn't it? Date, my children!

nice sorry hiking house outdoors harvard google drink math cornell

Edit: PS: you're 1 out of 45 either way, but if you never date, that's when your odds are real crap. Dating only a small subset per year, just because you happened to meet; or getting the girl to stick with you because she just happened not to have met that guy who's perfect for her; that sounds much more depressing to me. Unless you believe in fate?

brazzy• 12 years ago

Hell, yes! And both of them think the grass is so much greener on the other side, and both of them are kind of right.

(It's greener because they use more manure over there, which means that here there's manure all over...)

nether• 12 years ago

She's a pretty white woman with the wits to get into Stanford. She pretty much won the genetic jackpot and her life will be easy and fun. Every single guy probably "yes'd" on her CMB profile. She was being picky with going on 1 date/week. My friend slept with four guys from OkC in one week and isn't even as attractive.

girvo2• 12 years ago

Dating is just meeting people of your preferred gender (for possible romance) -- it doesn't have to be so serious. I used to go on dates with no hope of leading to anything more than friendship, and it was a lot of fun! Got me out of my comfort zone, and I did meet my partner through that. There's nothing depressing about meeting a lot of people in my opinion, on the contrary it made me enjoy life more!

quietriot• 12 years ago

Please somebody try to make a coffee-enabled bagel.

If you know a bagel maker, and they have not tried adding extra-fine ground coffee to their bagel dough, might you suggest is please?

thirdtruck2• 12 years ago

Agreed! For that matter, is anyone in the coffee-plus-oatmeal market yet? I mix the two together on occasion, but haven't experimented with it thoroughly yet.

bobbles• 12 years ago

Don't suppose you're Australian?

My goto breakfast of champions is the Carmans crunchy clusters[1] (honey roasted nut), using a Dare double espresso as the milk.[2]

Soooo gooood

1 http://www.carmanskitchen.com.au/our-products/clusters#Honey...

2 http://www.dareicedcoffee.com.au/Product

beachstartup3• 12 years ago

http://jezebel.com/5902718/creepy-finance-guy-with-spreadshe...

if this guy's only creepy, what does it make the person who tracks punctuation marks, runs linear regressions, and trains learning algorithm using data collected on dates?

bitwize• 12 years ago

It's only creepy when men do it. When a woman does it she is just being meticulous about her own interests.

Blackthorn2• 12 years ago

Assuming this is an honest question, the guy is creepy because men preying on women is much more common than the other way around.

beachstartup3• 12 years ago

how exactly is going on dates preying?

tsotha3• 12 years ago

In what way? What do you mean by "preying"?

majormajor• 12 years ago

A few differences that seem pretty big: * after-the-fact tracking and analysis vs a sorta in-progress playbook for trying to score * not sharing personal information, and not coming off nearly as judgmental in commenting on individual people—especially in the "not sending it to someone you're interested in and seeing" category, jeeze * sarcasm and jokes are a pretty well-established way of treading on could-be-creepy ground in a less off-putting way

Even the Jezebel post itself, with its tracking down and interviewing people in the spreadsheet, is more creepy than this blog post...

tsotha3• 12 years ago

You have to understand what a woman means when she labels a guy "creepy". It just means she's getting attention from someone she doesn't find attractive.

If spreadsheet guy looked like Benedict Cumberbatch instead of being "creepy" he'd be, you know, innovative. The kind of guy who thinks outside the box in new and exciting ways. Particularly if he had money.

normloman2• 12 years ago

No, he'd still be creepy.

Lately, a lot of guys have repeated this misconception about "creepy," -- that it just means you're unattractive, and not genuinely unsettling. I'm sure that shields a lot of guy's egos. And maybe, in some cases, creepy really does mean unattractive. But creepy still has it's other meaning too.

That spreadsheet thing would be creepy no matter who did it. Because the guy is trying to approach dating like a math problem (is he socially awkward?). Because he's keeping detailed notes of everyone he's met (who does that?). Because he probably sees women like entries in a spreadsheet.

rflrob• 12 years ago

I could rationalize the message ratio as sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If she sent many messages, she was probably already interested in him for some reason, and so would be more likely to rate him highly at the end.

As a methodological point, I would also have taken the log of all the ratios, especially when doing a linear regression. A ratio of .01 looks like .00001 to a linear regression, but they are quite different. Of course, if the dynamic range is relatively small (probably within 2 fold either direction) maybe it wouldn't matter too much.

brianbreslin• 12 years ago

@ginny2357 I am curious what other statistical factors you used or kept that weren't used in the analysis. A friend who was a former PM at match said that height, income, race, and occupation were the four most important factors (in that order) for women to select men.

If you're ever in Miami, let's discuss this over a drink.

7Figures2Commas3• 12 years ago

If your friend is correct, you should probably post your height, income, race and occupation here so that she can take your offer for drinks under serious consideration. Your proper use of "you're" and reference to "statistical factors" isn't enough to stand out on HN.

ginny23573• 12 years ago

Brian I'd love to but I don't frequent Miami.

mmastrac• 12 years ago

Given that the rest of the posts on the blog were of the rough form "using marketing channel X to meet people", this probably leads into the next article on writing technical posts to catch the eye of an interesting crowd... "Should you make Hacker News your new dating app?"

Coffee Meets Bagel Meets Me – Statistical analysis of online dating

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