A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people -those linked by strong social ties -within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term 'dispersion' -the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.
Backstrom et al. REF used the network structure of an individual's ego network to identify their romantic partner.
Romantic partnerships and the dispersion of social ties: a network analysis of relationship status on facebook
CSCW '14
Psychology Computer Science Physics