eHarmony was founded to give people a better chance to find someone for a long lasting relationship. As one of the first companies we have applied advanced technology what became known as Data Science these days to the age old problem of matchmaking. Over the years eHarmony has accumulated vast amount of data on variety of romantic interactions. This data a is a treasure trove of entertaining tidbits and nuggets of insight into human nature. I will share some of those in hope that people may find them useful but more importantly I will also demonstrate how we actually use this data to make recommendations and give single people an upper hand in finding “The One”. In particular I will show how we utilize hadoop (YARN) to process billions of pairs of user profiles to find ngrams and other features that are predictive of romantic attraction and how we use the features discovered for large scale machine learning using vowpal wabbit`s allreduce parallell learning. Finally I am going to describe an optimization technique that decides what matches to deliver to who and when but which is more broadly aplicable to other domains such as advertising or constrained recommendations.

1. Wednesday, June 26, 13

2. Hadoop in Love
@petricek
Wednesday, June 26, 13

3. The eHarmony Difference › Who we are
~45% Tech
Wednesday, June 26, 13

4. The eHarmony Difference › Who we are
~15% Customer Care
~45% Tech
Wednesday, June 26, 13

5. The eHarmony Difference › Who we are
~15% Customer Care
~45% Tech
~10% Marketing
Wednesday, June 26, 13

6. The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Wednesday, June 26, 13

7. The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Compatibility Matching
System®
Wednesday, June 26, 13

8. The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Compatibility Matching
System®
Compatibility
Matching
1
Wednesday, June 26, 13

9. The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Compatibility Matching
System®
Compatibility
Matching
1
Affinity
Matching
2
Wednesday, June 26, 13

10. The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Compatibility Matching
System®
Match
Distribution
3
Compatibility
Matching
1
Affinity
Matching
2
Wednesday, June 26, 13

11. The eHarmony Difference
Wednesday, June 26, 13

12. Affinity
Matching
Match
Distribution
2 3
The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Compatibility
Matching
1
Wednesday, June 26, 13

13. Affinity
Matching
Match
Distribution
2 3
The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Compatibility
Matching
1
Wednesday, June 26, 13

14. Wednesday, June 26, 13

15. 150
ques)ons
Wednesday, June 26, 13

16. 150
ques)ons
Personality
Values
A5ributes
Beliefs
Wednesday, June 26, 13

17. Compatibility Matching › Obstreperousness
Wednesday, June 26, 13

18. Compatibility Matching › Romantic
Wednesday, June 26, 13

19. Marital satisfaction
Wednesday, June 26, 13

20. Marital satisfaction
Wednesday, June 26, 13

21. Compatibility Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

22. Compatibility Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

23. Match
Distribution
3
Compatibility
Matching
1
Affinity
Matching
2
The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Wednesday, June 26, 13

24. Match
Distribution
3
Compatibility
Matching
1
Affinity
Matching
2
The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Layers on Top of
Compatibility Matching
Wednesday, June 26, 13

25. Affinity Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

26. 61 21
Affinity Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

27. 61 21
3000
Affinity Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

28. 61 21
3000
Affinity Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

29. Affinity Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

30. ………
Affinity Matching ›
Wednesday, June 26, 13

31. Affinity Matching › Distance
Prob(
)
Wednesday, June 26, 13

32. Affinity Matching › Distance
Wednesday, June 26, 13

33. Affinity Matching › Height difference
Prob(
) 4
-­‐
8
in
cm
Wednesday, June 26, 13

34. Affinity Matching › Zoom level
Wednesday, June 26, 13

35. Affinity Matching › Zoom level
Wednesday, June 26, 13

36. Affinity Matching › Zoom level
Wednesday, June 26, 13

37. life
Affinity Matching › Semi-structured Text
life
my
smile
my
smile
world
world
my me
my
me
I I
I
I
Wednesday, June 26, 13

38. life
Affinity Matching › Semi-structured Text
life
my
smile
my
smile
world
world
Wednesday, June 26, 13

39. life
Affinity Matching › Semi-structured Text
life
my
smile
my
smile
world
world
Wednesday, June 26, 13

40. Affinity Matching ›
~40M
registered
users
~10^7
matches
per
day
~10^3
a5ributes
...
...
Prob( | data)
?
~10^8
daily
Prob( | features)
Wednesday, June 26, 13

41. UserMatchCommunica)on
feature
expansion
Sparse
ML
format
models
Affinity Matching › Model Training: Maestro
Protocol
Buffers
vowpal
wabbit,
boosted
trees
Wednesday, June 26, 13

42. 750M
Compressed
Protocol
Buffers
Map-­‐side
joins
(~TB)
Matching
User
Serice
Pairings
Browser
Service
1+G
Compressed
Protocol
Buffers
Affinity Matching › Production: Conductor
Wednesday, June 26, 13

43. ...
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
Affinity Matching › Scorer
Wednesday, June 26, 13

44. ...
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
Affinity Matching › Scorer
Wednesday, June 26, 13

45. ...
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
...
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
Prob( | data)
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
[User[Demographic][Photo][Ac)vity][FX]]
[Cand[Demographic][Photo]
[Ac)vity][FX]]
[Pairing[Distance][Flags]]
Affinity Matching › Scorer
Wednesday, June 26, 13

46. “same_religion”:”${user.profile.religion}=={cand.profile.religion}”
“cmp_drinking”:”cmp(${user.profile.drinking},{cand.profile.drinking})”
<
“strict_distance_u”:”${user.profile.accepted_distance}<={pairing.distance}”
60miles
Affinity Matching › Scala DSL
Wednesday, June 26, 13

47. Compatibility
Matching
1
Affinity
Matching
2
Match
Distribution
3
The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Wednesday, June 26, 13

48. Compatibility
Matching
1
Affinity
Matching
2
Match
Distribution
3
The eHarmony Difference › Compatibility Matching System®
Delivering the right
matches at the right time
to as many people as
possible across the
entire network.
Wednesday, June 26, 13

49. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
Wednesday, June 26, 13

50. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
Wednesday, June 26, 13

51. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
2 2
Wednesday, June 26, 13

52. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
2 21
Wednesday, June 26, 13

53. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
2 21Prob( | data)
Wednesday, June 26, 13

54. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
2 21Prob( | data)
Wednesday, June 26, 13

55. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
2 2Prob( | data)
Wednesday, June 26, 13

56. Match Distribution › Graph optimization
2 2Prob( | data)
Wednesday, June 26, 13

57. Resulting Customer Experience ›
Guided
Communication
Wednesday, June 26, 13

58. Resulting Customer Experience ›
Guided
Communication
Wednesday, June 26, 13

59. ? !
Resulting Customer Experience ›
Guided
Communication
Wednesday, June 26, 13

60. Resulting Customer Experience › Success!
Wednesday, June 26, 13

61. Resulting Customer Experience › Success!
Wednesday, June 26, 13

62. eHarmony Results › The eHarmony Impact
2005
90
eHarmony Members
Married Every Day
Wednesday, June 26, 13

63. eHarmony Results › The eHarmony Impact
2005 2007
236
eHarmony Members
Married Every Day
Wednesday, June 26, 13

64. eHarmony Results › The eHarmony Impact
2005 2007 2009
542
eHarmony Members
Married Every Day
Wednesday, June 26, 13

65. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences
Wednesday, June 26, 13

66. Press coverage
Wednesday, June 26, 13

67. Since
2005,
about
1/3
of
couples
who
have
married
in
the
US
have
met
online
(35%)
eHarmony Results › The eHarmony Impact
*
according
to
survey
of
couples
married
between
2005-­‐2012
by
Harris
InteracAve
for
eHarmony
Wednesday, June 26, 13

68. Rates of breakup or divorce
0%
2.0%
4.0%
6.0%
8.0%
All Online Offline
*
according
to
survey
of
couples
married
between
2005-­‐2012
by
Harris
InteracAve
for
eHarmony
Wednesday, June 26, 13

69. The
largest
number
of
marriages
surveyed
who
met
via
online
da)ng
had
met
on
eHarmony
(25%)
eHarmony Results › The eHarmony Impact
*
according
to
survey
of
couples
married
between
2005-­‐2012
by
Harris
InteracAve
for
eHarmony
Wednesday, June 26, 13

70. Rates of breakup or divorce
0%
2.0%
4.0%
6.0%
8.0%
eHarmony All Other Online Offline
*
according
to
survey
of
couples
married
between
2005-­‐2012
by
by
Harris
InteracAve
for
eHarmony
bit.ly/jobateharmony
Wednesday, June 26, 13

71. Rates of breakup or divorce
0%
2.0%
4.0%
6.0%
8.0%
eHarmony All Other Online Offline
*
according
to
survey
of
couples
married
between
2005-­‐2012
by
by
Harris
InteracAve
for
eHarmony
linkedin.com/in/petricek
bit.ly/jobateharmony
@petricek
Wednesday, June 26, 13