6 ms·

Coffee Meets Bagel Meets Me – Statistical analysis of online dating

76 points by ceph_ 12y ago

kelukelugames 12y 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 12y ago
  > It's a cute read That's all you needed.
thret 12y 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.
- ginny2357 12y 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 12y 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.
    - ginny2357 12y ago
      That was very accommodating of her.
      - 4ydx 12y ago
        I am guessing this is being said in a joking manner.
7Figures2Commas 12y 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-proof.pdf http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/PSPI-online_dating-p...
- GuiA 12y 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)
jplahn 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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/step.html https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/ste...
hurin 12y 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.
- girvo 12y 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. ;)
  - hurin 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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)
- nothrabannosir 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
- girvo 12y 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 12y 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?
- thirdtruck 12y 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 12y 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-Roasted-Nut-Crunchy-Clusters http://www.carmanskitchen.com.au/our-products/clusters#Honey... 2 http://www.dareicedcoffee.com.au/Product http://www.dareicedcoffee.com.au/Product
    - thirdtruck 12y ago
      Different continent, but thanks for the recommendation. :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
beachstartup 12y ago
http://jezebel.com/5902718/creepy-finance-guy-with-spreadsheet-of-matchcom-prospects-says-he-was-just-trying-to-be-organized 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 12y ago
  It's only creepy when men do it. When a woman does it she is just being meticulous about her own interests.
- Blackthorn 12y 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.
  - beachstartup 12y ago
    how exactly is going on dates preying?
    - normloman 12y ago
      Nobody's saying that this guy is preying. But the fact that other guys prey makes unusual behavior like this more suspect. Women have to be more careful than guys, since they are more likely to be abused. So naturally, they are more sensitive to unusual behavior. You and I see this spreadsheet and think "this dude's just awkward, but probably harmless." But some women might think "serial killer alert." This is partly because of the media (watch enough dateline and you'll think every man's a kidnapper). But partly because of reality - some men do sick shit, and women are scared. My wife has some stories about past dates she's been on that would repulse you.
      - beachstartup 12y ago
        uh, women also do sick shit to men. it's 2015, being a twisted, terrible human being is now an equal opportunity phenomenon.
rflrob 12y 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.
choicenotchance 12y ago
This article doesn't show any data analysis, no code, no results, nothing. I'm wondering how much I should scold myself for wasting my time on nonsense which ended with no useful conclusions.
brianbreslin 12y 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.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y 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.
- ginny2357 12y ago
  Brian I'd love to but I don't frequent Miami.
mmastrac 12y 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?"

76 points by ceph_ 12y 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 12y ago
> It's a cute read That's all you needed.

thret 12y 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.

ginny2357 12y 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 12y 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.
  - ginny2357 12y ago
    That was very accommodating of her.
    - 4ydx 12y ago
      I am guessing this is being said in a joking manner.

7Figures2Commas 12y 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-proof.pdf http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/PSPI-online_dating-p...

GuiA 12y 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)

jplahn 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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/step.html https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/ste...

hurin 12y 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.

girvo 12y 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. ;)
- hurin 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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)

nothrabannosir 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
girvo 12y 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 12y 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?

thirdtruck 12y 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 12y 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-Roasted-Nut-Crunchy-Clusters http://www.carmanskitchen.com.au/our-products/clusters#Honey... 2 http://www.dareicedcoffee.com.au/Product http://www.dareicedcoffee.com.au/Product
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    Different continent, but thanks for the recommendation. :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

beachstartup 12y ago

http://jezebel.com/5902718/creepy-finance-guy-with-spreadsheet-of-matchcom-prospects-says-he-was-just-trying-to-be-organized 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 12y ago
It's only creepy when men do it. When a woman does it she is just being meticulous about her own interests.
Blackthorn 12y 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.
- beachstartup 12y ago
  how exactly is going on dates preying?
  - normloman 12y ago
    Nobody's saying that this guy is preying. But the fact that other guys prey makes unusual behavior like this more suspect. Women have to be more careful than guys, since they are more likely to be abused. So naturally, they are more sensitive to unusual behavior. You and I see this spreadsheet and think "this dude's just awkward, but probably harmless." But some women might think "serial killer alert." This is partly because of the media (watch enough dateline and you'll think every man's a kidnapper). But partly because of reality - some men do sick shit, and women are scared. My wife has some stories about past dates she's been on that would repulse you.
    - beachstartup 12y ago
      uh, women also do sick shit to men. it's 2015, being a twisted, terrible human being is now an equal opportunity phenomenon.

rflrob 12y 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.

choicenotchance 12y ago

This article doesn't show any data analysis, no code, no results, nothing. I'm wondering how much I should scold myself for wasting my time on nonsense which ended with no useful conclusions.

brianbreslin 12y 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.

7Figures2Commas 12y 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.
ginny2357 12y ago
Brian I'd love to but I don't frequent Miami.

mmastrac 12y 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?"