Machine Learning for Phone-Based Relationship Estimation: The Need to Consider Population Heterogeneity.

Abstract

Estimating the category and quality of interpersonal relationships from ubiquitous phone sensor data matters for studying mental well-being and social support. Prior work focused on using communication volume to estimate broad relationship categories, often with small samples. Here we contextualize communications by combining phone logs with demographic and location data to predict interpersonal relationship roles on a varied sample population using automated machine learning methods, producing better performance (F1 = 0.68) than using communication features alone (F1 = 0.62). We also explore the effect of age variation in the underlying training sample on interpersonal relationship predicti..