RECON: a reciprocal recommender for online dating

The reciprocal recommender is a class of recommender system that is important for several tasks where people are both the subjects and objects of the recommendation. Some examples are: job recommendation, mentor-mentee matching, and online dating. Despite the importance of this type of recommender, our work is the first to distinguish it and define its properties. We have implemented RECON, a reciprocal recommender for online dating, and have evaluated it on a large dataset from a major Australian dating website. We investigated the predictive power gained by taking account of reciprocity, finding that it is substantial, for example it improved the success rate of the top ten recommendations from 23% to 42% and also improved the recall at the same time. We also found reciprocity to help with the cold start problem obtaining a success rate of 26% for the top ten recommendations for new users. We discuss the implications of these results for broader uses of our approach for other reciprocal recommenders.