Nearly accurate relationship status algorithm calls President Trump single

Washington: An artificial intelligence (AI) system that predicts the relationship statuses of people, based on their social media habits, has said that US President Donald Trump is single. Developed by researchers at the ITMO University in St Petersburg and the National University of Singapore, the system uses and analyses data from Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.

According to a report by The Independent, The algorithm made the guess by following President Trump’s tweeting habits, which led them to conclude that he lives “like a bachelor.” The system is said to have an 86 percent accuracy rate. Parameters such as the length of tweets, kinds of image frequently posted and check-in distribution are analysed to predict the marital status of the user.

The experiment, presented at an artificial intelligence conference in San Francisco, used data from the social media accounts of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Barack Obama’s marital status was correctly guessed as married.

The developers are of the opinion that the inconsistency could be attributed to the President’s bachelor-like habits such as late night tweeting and that his assistants update the account for him.

“We all know about his wife Melania,” said Andrey Filchenkov, associate professor of Computer Technology Department at ITMO. He continued that the AI attempted to guess the marital status of those who were running Trump’s social media accounts.

The experiment was designed to predict future trends in “making human psychological portraits.”

Kseniya Buraya, a co-author of the presentation was quoted as saying that several scientific sources associate a person's psychological type with the marital status.

It has recently been suggested by a Zurich publication Das Magazin, that a company called Cambridge Analytica used highly sophisticated "data modelling and psychographic profiling" techniques for Trump’s presidential campaign.