A social networking system predicts a user's top friends among the user's connections in a social networking system. A top friend prediction model receives static data and statistics related to the historical interactions of the connection and the user as input singles. The model may be trained using a training set of data associated with the connections of users, where users have explicitly indicated that other users are or are not their top (or “best” or “closest”) friends. The trained model outputs a score for each of a particular user's connections, and the score is used to predict whether the connection is a top friend of that user. Whether a user's connection is one of that user's top friends thus indicates a closeness of that relationship in the real world, which may differ from how likely the users are to interact with each other within the social networking system.