Explicit and Implicit User Preferences in Online Dating

Abstract

In this paper we study user behavior in online dating, in particular the differences between the implicit and explicit user preferences. The explicit preferences are stated by the user while the implicit preferences are inferred based on the user behavior on the website. We first show that the explicit preferences are not a good predictor of the success of user interactions. We then propose to learn the implicit preferences from both successful and unsuccessful interactions using a probabilistic machine learning method and show that the learned implicit preferences are a very good predictor of the success of user interactions. We also propose an approach that uses the explicit and implicit preferences to rank the candidates in our recommender system. The results show that the implicit ranking method is significantly more accurate than the explicit and that for a small number of recommendations it is comparable to the performance of the best method that is not based on user preferences.