What does your dating profile say about your age?
We dug through, experimented with, and analyzed data from OkCupid for this final project. Experience the data for yourself below!
About the Dataset
We used a set of user profiles and survey responses scraped from the OkCupid dating platform in 2015-2016. It contains approximately 60,000 user records with over 2600 unique survey questions. The data is ~1GB in size and structured in CSV format across multiple files: user profiles containing demographics, personality traits, preferences and question answer options, and a question file with survey question text and answer options.
Data Quality Checks
Before developing predictive models, we conducted essential exploratory data analysis to understand our dataset's characteristics and validate our assumptions about the user population.
Age Distribution
We plotted a histogram of user ages to verify that the age distribution makes sense for an online dating platform. As we hypothesized, most users fall on the younger side, around 20-40 years of age, and there are few users above 60 or below 18. This is a useful reality check because it helps ensure that the age data is reasonable and free from obvious errors (such as implausibly high or low ages), which could otherwise distort our predictive model.
Sex Drive Distribution
For another sanity check we compared sex drive to the question “Regardless of future plans, what's more interesting to you right now?” (Love/Sex). In the graph we show the people in the top 20% by sex drive, and in all bins in the histogram the preference is for sex, growing much more clear as the sex drive rises! Very fitting for users with the highest sex drive.
Model Performance Comparisons
Our approach systematically explores four distinct neural network architectures, progressing from simple baseline models to sophisticated ensemble methods with advanced feature engineering.
Simple Model
| MAE | R2 | ± 5 years |
| 5.22 | 0.1649 | 61.1% |
K-fold Model
| MAE | R2 | ± 5 years |
| 5.23 | 0.1613 | 60.8% |
Enhanced Simple Model
| MAE | R2 | ± 5 years |
| 5.20 | 0.1843 | 59.8% |
Enhanced K-fold Model
| MAE | R2 | ± 5 years |
| 5.23 | 0.1661 | 61.0% |
LLM-Based Model
| MAE | R2 | ± 5 years |
| 6.75 | 0.1121 | 48.00% |
Beat the Models!
Are you better at guessing ages than our model? Play this game to find out!
User Profile
- interested in -
Drug use: -
Self-confidence: -
Regardless of future plans, what's more interesting to you right now, love or sex? -
Could you date someone who was really messy? -
Are you either vegetarian or vegan? -
How important is religion/God in your life? -
Do you like scary movies? -
How long do you want your next relationship to last? -
How often are you open with your feelings? -
How willing are you to meet someone from OkCupid in person? -
Could you date someone who does drugs? -