Cornell大学Jon Kleinberg刚刚完成一个工作，以Facebook数据为基础，回答了这样一个问题：在一个人的所有朋友中，你能把他或她的 romantic partner 挑出来吗？

ABSTRACT
 

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.

全文PDF ，网址： http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6753v1.pdf

New York Times对此文做了评述： PDF