5.1 Overview

The dating scene has drastically changed from relying on solely traditional methods to incorporating the digital dating world as well. In the past, people met potential spouses with the help of mutual friends and a variety of offline activities.The digital age allows single individuals to use diverse channels to meet prospective matches. In the early 90s, chatting, instant messaging, and the Internet community were ways that individual connected online. In recent years, social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter have attracted people around the world to build and expand their social network online. As with such technical and cultural context, online dating services have emerged for the purpose of helping users find new people online who are well-matched with them.

Online dating services have been becoming popular due to its sophisticated matching algorithms relying on big and rich data of users. Online dating services provide a larger pool of people for singles to meet, with a higher chance for a successful match, than traditional methods that took place before online dating sites. In fact, one in five relationships begins on social media and online dating sites [1]. There are currently over fifty four million single Americans and almost fifty million have used online dating services at some point in their lives [2]. Matches made through online dating services are typically done by analyzing data provided or collected from the user and compared to other user’s information of profiles. The large amount of information that online dating sites collect and produce create ‘big data’. Big data is a major reason that online dating has succeeded and continues to be successful. There are many sites that ask up to four hundred questions per individual to obtain the most accurate match for their customers [3].

In this chapter, online dating is defined and its relation to big data is illustrated. The following sections will review who is using online dating and how clients can create successful matches. In addition, the sections to follow will describe how matches are made using big data algorithms and machine learning. Throughout this chapter readers will learn how big data is utilized to help individuals create a variety of relationships through the nontraditional method of online dating resources.