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Facebook study claims to know when you and your partner are going to break up

Wondering if you and your romantic partner are going to last? According to a new study from Facebook and Cornell University, how 'interconnected' your social circles are might be a good indication, but maybe not in the way that you think.

Facebook senior engineer Lars Backstrom and Cornell computer scientist Jon Kleinberg, anonymously examined data from 1.3 million randomly-selected Facebook users who identified themselves as married, engaged or 'in a relationship', were 20 years old older, and had between 50 and 2,000 friends. The two organized the data and looked at two different ideas about how a person's social network is linked together — 'embeddedness' (how many mutual friends the couple share) and 'dispersion' (how their mutual friends are connected).

When Backstrom and Kleinberg tried to use embeddedness to predict someone's partner, it didn't do very well — with only a 33 per cent success rate for spouses and just over 13 per cent for those 'in a relationship'. Dispersion, on the other hand, did noticeably better — picking a person's spouse over 60 per cent of the time, or their partner 'in a relationship' 35 per cent of the time. If they simple guessed at it, with at least 50 friends to choose from per user, it would have only produced a match 2 per cent of the time, at the most.

What's interesting about all this is that it was high-dispersion social circles — those that were less interconnected — that pointed more towards the person's partner.

For example, in the graphic pictured above, the person is at the centre, with two highly-interconnected (thus low-dispersion) social circles to the top (work) and to the right (college), and a sparsely interconnected (thus high-dispersion) social circle to the lower left. The person's spouse — circled in green — is quite far removed from the low-dispersion groups, but is smack-dab in the middle of the high-dispersion group, and acts as a bridge between that group and the person in the middle.

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As for how this relates to breakups, the two researchers watched the relationship status of everyone in the study that listed themselves as 'in a relationship' (as opposed to engaged or married), and recorded it every two months for a total of two years. Overall, the chance of a breakup over the course of the study was pretty low, maxing out at around 7% at the start and going down to around 2% over time. However, at least for the first year, those couples where dispersion wasn't able to correctly predict the partner in the relationship were around 50 per cent more likely to have changed their relationship status to 'single' after any particular 2-month period.

What do we take away from all of this? First off, I guess, it reinforces those old dating rules of avoiding work and our circle of friends when looking for a romantic partner. Also, this research is all part of an effort to help Facebook better deliver content and ads to your homepage by learning more about the relationships of its users. So, if you really like your partner, but start to see more dating website ads show up on your Facebook page, perhaps it's time to branch out a bit more in your social circle.

(Image courtesy: Cameron Marlow/Facebook)

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