Researchers Draw Romantic Insights From Maps of Facebook Networks

It’s not in the stars after all. Instead, it seems, the shape of a person’s social network is a powerful signal that can identify one’s spouse or romantic partner -- and even if a relationship is likely to break up. So says a new research paper written by Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, and Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook.

The paper will be presented at a conference on social computing in February 2013. The pair used a hefty data set from Facebook as their lab: 1.3 million Facebook users, selected randomly from among all users who are at least 20 years old, with from 50 to 2,000 friends, who list a spouse or relationship partner in their profile. That makes for a lot of social connections to analyze, roughly 379 million nodes and 8.6 billion links. The data was used anonymously. A yardstick called dispersion, a term used for the number of mutual friends shared in a network, measures not only mutual friends, but also friends from the further-flung reaches of a person’s network neighborhood. High dispersion occurs when a couple’s mutual friends are not well connected to one another. Particularly intriguing is that when this algorithm fails to identify a user’s spouse, it looks as if the relationship is in trouble.