Self-Organising Map Approach to Individual Profiles: Age, Sex and Culture in Internet Dating

A marked feature of recent developments in the networked society has been thegrowth in the number of people making use of Internet dating services. Theseservices involve the accumulation of large amounts of personal information whichindividuals utilise to find others and potentially arrange offline meetings. Theconsequent data represent a challenge to conventional analysis, for example, theservice that provided the data used in this paper had approximately 5,000 usersall of whom completed an extensive questionnaire resulting in some 300parameters. This creates an opportunity to apply innovative analyticaltechniques that may provide new sociological insights into complex data. In thispaper we utilise the self-organising map (SOM), an unsupervised neural networkmethodology, to explore Internet dating data. The resulting visual maps are usedto demonstrate the ability of SOMs to reveal interrelated parameters. The SOMprocess led to the emergence of correlations that were obscured in the originaldata and pointed to the role of what we call ‘cultural age’ in the profiles andpartnership preferences of the individuals. Our results suggest that the SOMapproach offers a well established methodology that can be easily applied tocomplex sociological data sets. The SOM outcomes are discussed in relation toother research about identifying others and forming relationships in a networksociety.