Dating insights from a hedge fund quant: Sample, calibrate, "act decisively when you see something better"

Dating is often regarded as more of an art than a science, but you can still take a quantitative approach to improve your chances of happiness. A recent video from Ioana Roman, a London-based quant developer within the hedge fund arm of Man Group, broke down how mathematical processes are already being used in the dating scene, and how the decision-making process is similar to that of a quant trader in finance.

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Roman, speaking hypothetically rather than of her own dating life, said that "you have several options, probably too many options. The paradox of choice is real and it is slightly exhausting." Technological advances in the past few decades have also greatly increased the number of (romantic) candidates that the average person sees. Single people are therefore presented with a noisier real-world application of the secretary problem; you don't know whether the dates that you've exposed yourself to are actually representative of the broader dating pool so, if you choose to commit to someone ('your stopping point'), you don't know whether they're the right partner for you. 

This is also impacted by the complex algorithms that dating apps use to show you potential dates, and the underlying scoring systems that power them. Tinder previously used a chess-like Elo system (which Roman called "slightly alarming") but apps have since switched to more dynamic models that look at how your profile and photos compare to other profiles that users have matched with. In either case, Roman said that "the core intuition persists; your ranking is relative, contextual and dynamic."

So how do you decide who to swipe on? Roman said that this decision is "similar to when a trader decides whether to execute a position now or to wait." She said that the way you assess someone's profile, "if you squint, looks a lot like Bayesian inference;" you will hold certain beliefs about a person based on your initial reaction, but as you look further you "update your beliefs in proportion to how much the new information would shift them." 

Roman's example was that you might like the look of someone's profile initially but, "if you see a photo of someone holding a fish," that will change your perspective "if you have very strong prior beliefs about people who hold fish in their profile photos." Roman doesn't extend this to the reverse situation, but the process can also be used to assess whether someone would like you back; doing so could prevent you wasting likes on profiles that might have otherwise negatively affected your perception within the algorithm.

Roman said that deciding whether to commit to someone is similar to committing to a career path or city; "you sample enough to calibrate, then you act decisively when you see something better." Who said math couldn't be romantic?

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