Learning to Love Data

Hey Everybody,

I've just listened to the first episode of the Harvard Data Science Review Podcast. It's a really great podcast covering new topics every episode. They bring in experts from each field and discuss the research and data analysis that they've done throughout their careers.

The first episode was called "The Data of Love." Experts John and Julie Gottman discussed the use of data science while answering the questions of will a couple stay together or not and if they are together, how happy will they be in the future? Rather than making predictions on compatibility, which Julie Gottman believes is a myth, they analyzed how partners interacted with each other. For example, a husband inherits money from his uncle and they can't decide how to use it. The wife wants to spend it while the husband wants to save it. How are they going to resolve the conflict? Using ratios of positive to negative emotion, John and a mathematical biologist named James Murray developed differential equations to predict outcomes of relationships and determined that patience and willingness to listen and compromise are the traits that are more likely to result in a long-lasting and healthy relationship.

I was surprised to find out that there were ways to apply data analytics to questions of love. Although much of it has to do with psychology, there is math involved in determining patterns of adrenaline or blood pressure and ways to code behavioral outcomes before they happen. Something else I found unexpected was the fact that compatibility in interests is a much less useful thing in determining whether two people will work well in a relationship than the way people interact and behave with each other.

Love (haha),

Noah